


May, December, and Some Romance

by Comicbooklovergreen



Series: More than One Kind of Soulmate [13]
Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Carol (2015), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Price of Salt - Patricia Highsmith
Genre: But not involving the lesbians, Carol just wants Therese to be okay, Crossover, Everyone's in swimwear, F/F, F/M, Heterosexual Sex, Lesbian Sex, Light Dom/sub, Multi, OT3, Peggy doesn't mention a lot of things, Polyamory, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Referenced acts of PTSD related violence, Rough Sex, Soft Carol, Stegginelli, Steve and Therese in the dead dad's club, Threesome - F/F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:21:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 59,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21796756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Comicbooklovergreen/pseuds/Comicbooklovergreen
Summary: Follows Carol and Therese and Peggy, Steve and Angie from May through December of 1956. Each chapter covers a month in their lives.July“Carol…you were holding me back like you thought it’d be dangerous if you didn’t. Like you thought Steve was dangerous.”“He’s Steve,” Carol said, dismissive.“And?”“And, if I thought he was dangerous to you, if I thought anyone was dangerous to you, they wouldn’t be near you.”She’d been alone with Steve countless times, sat in his garage while they worked quietly on their own creative pursuits. They’d shared his old, worn sofa, sometimes pressed close together while Steve showed her his sketches. She’d fallen asleep against his shoulder once or twice after too long a night and too many beers, woken up to a gentle shake of her arm and that crooked, closed-mouth smile of his. She’d never once worried, never heard a word from Carol about it.“And, you held me back,” Therese said slowly. “You kept me from getting near him.”Two unconventional families form an unbreakable bond. Tracing a friendship and a family through the years.
Relationships: Abby Gerhard/Rose Roberts, Angie Martinelli/Steve Rogers, Carol Aird/Therese Belivet, Peggy Carter/Angie Martinelli, Peggy Carter/Angie Martinelli/Steve Rogers, Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers
Series: More than One Kind of Soulmate [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/486383
Comments: 62
Kudos: 67





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys, I'm back with more of the crossover absolutely no one asked for. New format for this one, for reasons I'll explain in later notes, but basically? Longer waits but longer chapters is the name of the game right now.
> 
> Also, I know my audience, and I'm kind of sorry, but there will be het sex. There will also be more lesbian sex, and none of the het sex will involve our favorite lesbians. I'm trying to up the sex in general. Since I know het sex is a no-no for some, I will do my best to warn everyone beforehand, so you can skip to your heart's content. I'm very sorry, but if there is one thing I definitely am, it is a filthy bisexual who enjoys imaging all my faves doing all the things. 
> 
> So, if you want to shield your eyes, stop reading after the Belivaird love scene. There's only the one so, yeah, please don't yell at me if you read past that.
> 
> Comments are, as always, deeply appreciated.

Therese had never in her life been so entranced by someone swimming. Especially a man. But it wasn’t swimming, was it? Not with Steve.

He lay at the bottom of the pool, his back inches from the concrete, hands interlaced at the back of his head as though he were taking a nap. He’d been that way over ten minutes now. An Adonis in swim trunks, like a sculpture out of the museums in the city. Therese wasn’t entirely sure that he wasn’t actually sleeping. She couldn’t look away.

“Hey, you horny little queer, quit perving over my things!”

Therese nearly fell out of her lounge chair.

It was late May, and hot, and they were gathered around the Carter-Martinelli-Rogers pool. Which had not existed two weeks ago, when Therese was here last, and which they’d only found out about when the air conditioning in the apartment broke, and Carol called to complain.

“Rindy’s insisting she’s going to die,” she’d told Peggy, with an eyeroll.

“Bring her round for a swim. We’ve already been invaded by the gays anyway.”

“What?”

“Bring her over. She and Lizzie can run each other ragged.”

“You have a pool?”

“Sure.”

“Since when?”

“It’s a recent development. What? Steve got absurd amounts of backpay from being stuck underwater. We might as well get a pool out of it.”

“Are you serious?”

“Steve had it put in over the weekend. Surprised Angie after she came home from a meeting about that Italia picture. He likes ruining her fun.”

When they’d first come to the house, Angie told Therese that their swimming pool was just out of sight, that if you took the left fork of the driveway far enough, you’d hit the pool. Years later, she’d still maintained the joke.

“Having a pool put in counts as ruining fun?” Carol asked.

“There’s a diving board.”

“We’ll be there in an hour.”

They made it in fifty minutes. Angie insisted that the giant cement hole, and yes, the diving board, had always been there.

It was Angie who’d yelled, startled Therese out of her observation of Steve. She was at a shaded table, an umbrella covering her and Jake. Jake was on a towel, surrounded by toys. Therese hadn’t yet seen her make use of the pool today. She wore a bright, summery dress that showed off her legs.

“Shut it, Ange. You can’t even master being a proper goddamn lesbian!”

Oh. Therese understood now. It was Angelo who yelled this time. He was sat in his own lounge chair on the other side of the pool, with his much smaller, much darker boyfriend between his legs.

“Get your own hot blond, stronzo,” Angie yelled back. She sipped from the drink on the table.

“I am the hot blond,” Angelo replied. He pulled Georgie closer, made a show of kissing all over his shoulders.

Georgie laughed, allowed this for several seconds, then flicked Angelo’s chin. Said to stop bugging him while he watched the hot blond. Georgie wore sunglasses, but his eyes were very clearly on the bottom of the pool.

“How many times,” Carol asked from the lounger next to Therese, “is Angie going to scream about tiny queer people before you realize she’s not talking about you?”

Therese huffed, squinting in the sun. She’d pushed her own glasses to the top of her head when Steve sank to the bottom of the pool. Carol wore an old pair that probably cost more than a month of Therese’s wages. “It’s an easy mistake to make. He’s not tiny.”

“He’s her brother. To her, he’ll always be tiny.”

Therese looked at Carol. “Is it like that with you and your sister?”

“Elaine?” Carol asked as though she had more than one sister with a husband and three children, none of whom Therese had ever met. “She’s probably called me a filthy queer too, but never to my face. What Angie and Angelo have is much healthier.”

Therese shook her head. She wasn’t sure she’d ever understand sibling relationships.

Rindy was over near Angelo and Georgie, her arms braced on the edge of the pool as she floated.

“You look tired, kiddo,” Angelo said.

Rindy sighed. Heavily. “Sascha won’t quit crying,” she said, very put upon. “He’s annoying.”

Angelo nodded. “You have my greatest sympathy, brave Nerinda.”

Rindy giggled, then promptly got back to her miserable expression. “Does it get easier?”

“Do siblings get less annoying? It’s a nice dream, isn’t it? I’ll let you know if it ever comes true.”

Angelo made sure his voice carried. Angie sat forward in her chair. “Hey Rin, you want to see if Lizzie got lost getting those snacks?”

“Okay.”

Rindy hoisted herself up out of the water. Georgie got up to help her, hauling her up and out with a deceptively small arm. While he was doing that and Rindy was distracted, Angie gave her brother the finger.

“Don’t run!” Carol called as Rindy ran toward the door in search of Lizzie and popsicles. “Why does she never listen to me?”

“Maybe if you put a little more intent behind it,” said Therese.

“What’s that mean?”

“You’re distracted,” Therese replied, watching Carol watch Steve. “You could at least pretend not to be staring.”

“What, like you?”

“I was…that’s for artistic reasons.”

Carol snorted. “Oh how I wish I could paint, or draw, or photograph, so I had that excuse.”

“It would make a good picture.”

“And yet here you sit, watching, not taking.”

“I don’t want to be rude.”

“Don’t you have a picture of Jake urinating on his parents?”

She had several. “Not on purpose. But you, I thought you didn’t even like…that, anymore.” Therese gestured in the direction of Steve.

“That?” Carol repeated, amused. “I’ve never seen _that_ , honey.”

“You’ve seen Harge.”

“Harge was not that, even on his best day.” There was a table next to Carol, a drink on top of it. Carol picked up the drink, sipped. “Anyway, I’m just inspecting what it is that my tax dollars paid for.”

Therese scoffed. “Your parents’ tax dollars.”

“Would you prefer I shift my focus?”

“I wouldn’t complain if you did.”

“Anything for you, darling.”

Carol was true to her word. Even with sunglasses on, Therese saw her eyes track Peggy. Peggy, who’d been lapping the pool, one end to the other, for the last twenty minutes. Her hair was pulled back in a braid. Therese had never seen so much of her body before, with the exception of all those times Peggy fed Jake in front of them.

“Are you spilling your drink, or is that drool?” Therese asked.

“Mmm. Angie says Peggy’s trying to lose the baby weight.”

Despite herself, Therese squinted hard at Peggy. “What weight?”

“Exactly. Are we sure Jake is even hers?”

“Carol.”

“What? I did not look like that after Rindy.”

“Shhh,” said Therese. “The baby’s probably hers.” Probably. There wasn’t much she could completely rule out where Peggy was concerned.

“Mmm.”

“Are you going to stare all day?”

“Therese, really. I swam at school. I’m just admiring her form.”

“Yeah, I can see what you’re admiring.”

“Don’t fuss,” Carol said, taking Therese’s hand, kissing it. “I love you to this blazing hot sun and back, and I’m not that bad.”

Therese tried not to smile. “Compared to what?”

There was the honk of a car horn. Therese sat up, put her sunglasses on to see past the glare on the vehicle. Abby’s vehicle.

“Hello, hello," Abby said, all smiles as she approached, Rose on her arm. Both were dressed for a day at the pool.

Abby had a drink in her hand in record time. Rose went to Angie, presented Jake with a tiny pool toy in the shape of a shark.

“Afternoon, my lovelies,” Abby said after greeting Angelo and Georgie. She kissed Carol’s cheek first, then Therese’s.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Carol asked on a laugh.

“Oh, Rose mentioned there might be a little home improvement happening, and you know I never miss a good party.”

“Uh-huh,” Carol deadpanned.

“And apparently, she was with Peggy out west a few years ago, mentioned how Peggy’s quite fond of a good dip.”

“Good God,” said Therese.

Abby, totally unfazed, sat down at the end of Therese’s lounge chair. “She’s a very strong swimmer, isn’t she, Carol?”

“She really is.”

“I haven’t seen such good form since, what? Gertie Halsbrook in high school?”

“Oh, at least since Gertie Halsbrook. Do you see her anymore? What’s happened to her?”

“She has her charities. Supposedly. Promise you she doesn’t swim like that anymore.”

“Mmm. Poor Gertie.”

Therese stared at them, shook her head. “How am I the youngest one here?”

“What’s wrong, Therese?” Abby asked. She managed to portray something like genuine concern without ever looking away from Peggy.

“I just think you two could be a little more subtle.”

“Subtle,” Abby repeated. “Rose tells me that those two were about ready to jump each other in this pool before you showed up.” Abby nodded toward Georgie and Angelo, the latter of whom was being rubbed down with sunscreen by his boyfriend.

Carol made a face. “How would Rose know?”

“Rose knows everything,” Abby said without a trace of sarcasm.

“Rose doesn’t care that you’re here staring at Peggy?” Therese asked.

“You make it sound filthy. I have the utmost respect for Peggy, and I love Rose beyond words. Both of them know this. Rose and Peggy have nothing but trust and respect between them, the same as Rose and me.”

“And?” Therese prompted.

“And Rose gets to stare at Peggy all the time, I don’t. She’s treating me.”

Rindy and Lizzie returned from inside, Rindy lighting up on seeing the new guests “Aunt Abby!”

“Don’t run!” Carol called futilely as Rindy dashed toward them, waving a popsicle like a flag. Lizzie called out Rose’s name and made a beeline in that direction.

In her haste to hug Abby, Rindy grazed Abby’s arm with the popsicle. Abby shrieked. Therese felt a small sense of justice.

“Did you come to see me?” Rindy asked, practically in Abby’s lap.

“Of course I did, munchkin.” Abby bumped noses with Rindy, an Eskimo kiss in the heat. “Who else would I come all the way here for?”

Abby was still using the end of Therese’s lounger as a chair of her own. Therese bumped her foot into Abby’s hip.

Angie came to them a few minutes later, leaving Jake in his shaded spot near Lizzie and Rose. By then, Rindy had finished her popsicle, left a good portion of it on her face, ignored Carol’s warnings about stomachs and swimming, and was hanging around near the shallow end, begging Abby to come in with her.

“In a minute, sweetie, promise!” Abby called. She flicked Therese’s bare leg, spoke quieter. “It’s hotter than hell, and you’re not enjoying the view half as much as we are. Why don’t you go in with her?”

“And get you off the hook? Thanks, I’m good here.”

In truth, Therese wasn’t a confident swimmer. She knew the motions, she wasn’t helpless, but she wasn’t strong in it. Certainly not like Peggy, or the infamous Gertie Halsbrook. Her father had taught her, in the face of her mother’s disinterest, but he was still teaching her when he died. Her relationship with swimming was a little rocky.

Also, she really didn’t want to let Abby off the hook.

“Enjoying the show, ladies?” Angie asked. She’d taken up residence at the edge of Carol’s lounger. Neither Carol or Abby had made the slightest attempt to modify their slack-jawed expressions at her approach.

“Immensely,” Abby said without shame.

“Yeah.” Angie took on a slightly dreamy expression. “Come a long way, I tell you. One day you’re staring at the other kids running through the water on a hot day like this, after you’ve pried the fire hydrant open, wondering why you like the look of guys _and_ girls, and the next,” Angie gestured at the huge pool, Peggy lapping it, Steve floating serenely at the bottom. “Think you’re going to hell, but you wind up in heaven.”

“You worried about that?” Therese asked. “Getting in trouble over looking at girls? Your parents are so kind.”

“Yeah, they weren’t quite as kind until after the war, when they realized there were bigger things to worry about, so I had no reason to think I’d be in the clear, not then. I’m a Catholic, for God’s sake. You know how it is.”

Therese nodded. She certainly did.

“But hey, by the time Papa found me necking with Angelo’s girlfriend and Angelo necking with my boyfriend, he was fine with it. Happy I couldn’t get knocked up that way, happy Angelo couldn’t get some poor, dumb girl in trouble.”

“This would be the same poor, dumb girl you were necking with?”

“Right. So, everything worked out.”

“Uh-huh,” Therese replied as Angie smiled brightly.

She would never understand sibling relationships, she decided.

“Is Steve okay down there?” Carol asked. He was still at the bottom, Peggy passing above him again and again as she swam. “How long can he do that?”

Angie shrugged. “Howard would know better than me, he and Peg test that stuff. But he was good for a couple years last time. He’s fine.”

“He’s more than fine,” Angelo called. “He’s the only one who can keep that view.”

Peggy passed Steve again. Therese couldn’t believe it had taken her this long to realize that Peggy’s legs and chest were in Steve’s direct line of sight whenever she reached a certain place in the pool.

Therese was about to ask how well Steve could hear down there, until she saw his arm move in the water. He lifted his thumb up first, and then, much more quickly, his middle finger.

That answered that question, she supposed. She considered her options; thought about the camera she’d left inside so it wouldn’t get wet. “Are you going to be staying like that for awhile longer?” she asked, feeling only a little bit stupid. “It really would make a great picture.”

Steve raised both his thumbs, otherwise didn’t move.

Therese stood up, rushed to get her camera.

* * *

A short time later, Lizzie temporarily abandoned Rindy so she could follow Angie inside, beg her for yet another popsicle. Rindy took the time to climb the steps out of the pool, back to asking Abby and Carol just what was so interesting over here that no one wanted to come in with her.

Bored of watching Carol and Abby watch Peggy, Therese found herself sitting at the pool’s edge, her feet dangling in the water with Georgie next to her, speaking passionately about bikinis.

“They’re all the rage in France.”

“I’m not French,” Therese retorted. She’d left her sunglasses by her chair, didn’t have any dark lenses to hide her skepticism.

“You have a French name.”

“French sounding, and that’s only because my grandfather knew Americans hated Czechs more than French when he came here.”

“Still. I’ve seen enough of you to know you could definitely pull it off.”

If Georgie weren’t the single most queer man Therese had ever met, she might have been uncomfortable. As it was, he loved men the same way Abby loved women, greatly and exclusively, and he _had_ seen a fair bit of Therese’s body, or at least of how it moved. She sometimes photographed his dance lessons, the roomful of people to whom he so enthusiastically taught the fine art of salsa twice a week. Occasionally, he managed to drag her out from behind her camera for the full experience, promising that Carol would be absolutely thrilled by her new moves.

He hadn’t been wrong about that, not in the slightest, but he was definitely wrong here. “I’m sure you’d look much better in a bikini than me.”

“Well of course, Theresa, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try too.”

“Sorry. I don’t see how anyone could look anything but ridiculous in one of those.”

Georgie clicked his tongue. “For a fellow artist, you’re very repressed.”

Therese started a reply, got distracted by a heart attack. Rose had disappeared somewhere, maybe she’d followed Angie and Lizzie inside. Which was only heart attack inducing because it left Jake out of grabbing distance of any adult. Somehow, since the last time she’d looked his way, Jake had crawled to the edge of the pool, his hand hovering just over the water.

Therese stuttered something panicked and incoherent, fear of startling Jake and sending him into the water the only thing that kept her from shrieking.

Suddenly, like some sort of mythic sea monster, Steve was halfway across the pool, and in front of his son. He didn’t scoop Jake up, though. Instead, he became a bridge, allowed Jake to crawl onto his back.

It happened in the space of a blink. If this were a movie, Therese would think the film had skipped. As it was, she could hardly believe what she was seeing. Jake giggled happily, treating Steve like any common carpet.

Angie returned, carrying a fresh pitcher of lemonade which she set on the table. She did nothing more than sigh at the scene, rolling her eyes. “Don’t encourage him,” she said.

Steve ducked his head under the water and kept it there, presumably to keep from having to talk to Angie.

Angie sighed again, looked Therese’s way, noted her stricken expression. “It’s okay,” she said. “The doof here has him, and kiddo doesn’t like the water near as much as he thinks he does anyway.” Angie went to Jake and Steve, plucked the baby off of Steve’s back. She moved a few feet away from Steve, and then, carefully, lowered Jake enough that his tiny toes broke the water’s surface.

The result was instant. Jake’s face crinkled up, then crumpled. He made his displeasure well known; his cries much louder than the half-strangled sound Therese let out when she saw him at the edge.

The change when Angie lifted him up was just as swift. The noise ceased completely, like a switch being flipped.

“Anyone have any theories on how this,” Angie held the baby close again, “came from that?” She nodded at Steve, who still had his head underwater. “The big one’s in ice for years, doesn’t faze him. The little one acts like we’re going to murder him in his bathwater.”

“Leave the poor boy alone, Angie,” said a distinctly more British voice. Peggy had finally seen fit to pause her exercise, swimming in long, confident strides toward the edge of the pool.

“Oh dear God, I think it’s happening,” Carol murmured.

“I think so,” said Abby, sounding unusually breathless for someone who’s greatest exertion in the last hour was to stretch herself out in the chair Therese vacated.

Therese stared. “What is wrong with you two? I was kind of joking before, but now I’m serious. What’s wrong with you? She’s our friend, and she’s gorgeous, we all know that. Everyone knows that. You act like you’ve never seen her before.”

“You didn’t swim in school, did you, Therese?” Abby asked without taking her eyes off of Peggy.

“My school was run by nuns. Exposed skin wasn’t part of the curriculum.”

“Oh honey, you are about to get a beautiful and long overdue lesson.”

Used to having no idea what Abby was talking about, Therese ignored her, watched Peggy glide across the last few feet of water to the pool’s edge. And then she began to understand.

There was a ladder to get out of the pool. There were steps. Both within easy reach. Peggy utilized neither, hoisting herself up and out in one fluid motion. The muscles in her arms stretched with the action, water glinting off of them in the sun. She wasn’t wearing one of those bikinis Georgie talked about, but she didn’t need it. Hers was a sweetheart cut. It was like a girdle, but tighter, and somehow softer. It didn’t have any of the uncomfortable bits, no straps, and it somehow showed off both more and less than a girdle would. The skirt was so high it had to count as indecent. Harder to note all these details before, with Peggy swimming as though the inflatable shark in the pool were real. Even if it had been, Therese would place her bets on Peggy.

Dear God. She’d seen Peggy’s breasts in all their glory while Peggy fed Jake, but the _thighs_.

Rolling her shoulders, Peggy shook her head, causing drips of water to fly from her braid.

Oh.

Lizzie rejoined them at a run, holding a carrot stick, not a popsicle, which she promptly discarded on the table. “Daddy!” she yelled. Without missing a beat, she ran to her parents, ducked between Angie and Peggy, and stepped onto Steve’s back. She stood like a surfer as he turned in the water, swimming out toward the deeper end while Lizzie cheered.

It would’ve been an amazing picture, but somehow it wasn’t the thing that held Therese’s attention.

“Are there no bloody towels around here?” Peggy asked, scanning her surroundings. She shook her head again, causing more water to fly.

Rindy stood next to Abby, shaking her arm. “Aunt Abby, can we play yet?”

“Absolutely, Rindy, absolutely. We’re going to play a very important game called hide the towel.”

Rose had other plans, appearing suddenly with a towel, quick to wrap it around Peggy’s shoulders. “Here you are, Peg.”

“Thank you, Rose. You know, you’re not working today. You don’t have to do that.”

“I truly, truly don’t mind.”

Abby snorted.

After toweling herself off, Peggy took Jake from Angie, cuddling him close. “Sweetheart. Is Mama tormenting you again? Come here.” Bouncing him in her arms, Peggy walked away from Therese, giving her a fabulous view of the water droplets running down her legs. And other places.

Oh.

“You get it now?” Carol asked.

If Therese had had the brain power for it, she’d be annoyed at Carol’s smugness. “Yeah,” she said, because she definitely didn’t have the brain power.

With Peggy settled in the shade with Jake, Abby apparently decided the show was at an end. “Okay. Hey you,” she gave Rindy’s arm a tiny squeeze. “What’s with the standing out here doing nothing? Come on, it’s hot out! Get your butt in that pool!”

Rindy gave Abby a look that was so out of patience, so unbelievably Carol, that Therese burst out laughing.

“I am waiting for _you_ , Auntie.”

That one sounded so much like her mother that Therese and Carol both cracked up.

Abby raised her eyebrows, set aside her sunglasses, stood up. “Well _I_ am waiting on you now, little miss Let’s go!”

With that, Abby grabbed Rindy up into her arms. As Rindy giggled and shrieked, Abby carried her the few feet to the water, jumped. Rindy came up spluttering and panting, but far from unhappy. She went after Abby with gusto, laughing the whole time.

Angie, standing nearby, shrugged. “Ah, what the hell?” she asked no one in particular. Then she removed the sundress she’d worn all day, tossed it to a chair.

Oh.

Angie wore one of Georgie’s bikinis underneath. Not one of Georgie’s specifically, at least Therese hoped not, though she wouldn’t put it past them. Angie wore _a_ bikini, of the kind Georgie mentioned earlier. A light-yellow two-piece, the top had much less material than a bra, much less coverage. How it managed to stay on was, as far as Therese was concerned, a bigger scientific mystery than Steve holding his breath at the bottom of a pool for over twenty minutes.

The biggest question of all though, was how Peggy could look more obscene in a one-piece than Angie did in a bikini.

As Angie jumped in, swam off in the direction of Steve and Lizzie, Therese mentally revised her comments about everyone looking ridiculous in one of those things.

Angie’s exit (and what an exit it was) left Carol on her lounger, and Therese sitting at the pool’s edge. She turned her head, looked at Carol with wide eyes. “So, that’s a bikini.”

“That it is.”

Therese nodded, looked back at Angie’s body cutting through the water. “I definitely can’t pull one of those off.”

“No? I’d be more than willing to help with that.”

Carol’s smile was full of mischief. Therese blushed under the rays of the sun.

* * *

Carol went inside for a drink refill after that. In the interim, a game of Marco Polo took over part of the pool. Therese made a point to stay away, remaining in her place of safety. When Carol returned, she took a long sip of her drink, then set it down. The mischief from earlier hadn’t left her eyes, so Therese watched her closely.

Carol walked her long, sun-kissed legs over right next to Therese, imitating the dives Abby and Angie had made. She floated easily through the water, relaxed and smirking as she regarded Therese. “You’re hot,” she said.

Therese scoffed. “Your subtlety continues to astound me. You too.”

“Thank you. Your interpretation still stands, but I meant that you’re actually hot. You’ll end up with heatstroke sitting up there.”

Therese, who’d run through the city on newspaper errands on days ten degrees hotter than this, found Carol’s assessment suspect. “You think so?”

“Mmm. You’re very red, darling.”

“Am I? That’s not uncommon around you.”

“I’d rather you be wet.”

“Jesus, Carol.”

“What? It’s a pool party. That’s generally how these things go. See, now you’re even redder.”

Therese scoffed. “I wonder why.”

“I really think you should get in here, cool down.”

“Is that what you’re calling it?”

“What else?” Carol swam closer to the edge, close enough to take Therese’s hand. “Please? I won’t let anything happen.”

Her semi-aversion to swimming was another thing that relatively few people knew of. Carol knew, of course she did. “Should I be trusting you to play lifeguard when you’ve been drinking?” Therese teased.

“Not playing. Not when it comes to you. Besides, if you don’t trust me, we’ve got Steve. Who is apparently a fucking merman,” Carol added, her voice only slightly quieter.

Laughing, Therese followed Carol’s eyes, which had temporarily gone to Steve. He was now on his stomach, which Lizzie used as another surfboard, helping her avoid Rindy, who’d been designated seeker. “Apparently so,” Therese said, turning her attention back to Carol, and Carol’s back to her. “But I don’t need Steve. I trust you.”

Carol’s smile became softer around the edges. “Do you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Well then.” Carol swam back a few feet, smiling even brighter than before.

Therese let out an exaggerated breath. “I’m not diving,” she warned.

“Good.”

Shaking her head, Therese scooted forward along the edge until there was nowhere left to go but in. It was the first time all day that she’d been properly in the water, and she gasped at the temperature shift.

Therese shivered a moment, but smiled as she felt Carol’s hand on her arm, ready to help if needed. “I’m okay,” Therese promised.

“Yes?”

“Yeah. Promise.”

“Good,” Carol said again. Then she put a hand on Therese’s hip, another at her back, and kissed her.

“Oh, you’re such a liar,” Therese said, laughing into the kiss, instinctively grasping onto Carol as Carol started moving them further into the pool. “This is not cooling me down.”

“But it is making you wet.”

Another shiver wracked her body as Carol ran her fingers down Therese’s arms, droplets of water running down with them. “Carol, come on.” Therese squirmed as Carol kissed her cheek, her jaw.

“What?”

“Rindy.”

Their relationship hadn’t been a secret from Rindy for a very long time, but even in their home, there were occasions that Therese got nervous. Afraid to show too much affection in front of the child, to flaunt what she and Carol were. Not because of Rindy, but Harge, and what he might do if he heard of them acting too “inappropriately” in front of his daughter. Those worries were lessening, especially in recent weeks, but this felt entirely different than cuddling on the couch with Rindy tucked into Therese, and Therese tucked into Carol. This was more than just the three of them, with significantly more skin on display.

Carol kissed her lips. “Angel, she’s not even looking. It’s against the rules.”

Rindy’s eyes were indeed closed, as per the game. “She might cheat.”

“My daughter? Never. And if she does, we’ll blend in just fine.”

Angelo and Georgie were participating, but the former had his boyfriend’s legs wrapped around his waist as he floated along. Abby and Rose were also playing, and stealing contact with each other whenever they could.

Therese hated the part of her that remained nervous, no matter how small it was.

“Hey.” Carol stopped kissing her, nosed at her jaw, her neck, before looking Therese in the eye. “You’re okay. We’re okay. I have you.”

Therese breathed, focused on Carol’s eyes. On the strength of her body, the sureness of her motions, her hold. “I know,” she said, letting her head fall to Carol’s shoulder, kissing the bare skin there.

“Yes?”

“Yes. I know.” Therese breathed again, smiled on the exhale as she let the tension leave her body.

Rindy shouted the name of a long-dead explorer, and Therese kissed Carol again.

* * *

To Abby’s credit, she fully committed to making up for lost time with Rindy. She was up for whatever game Rindy felt like playing, and Rindy seemed quick to forget that she’d been ignored for a time.

Therese was content to watch, holding onto Carol as Carol lazily floated them along. Everything was fine until the third or fourth game of Marco Polo. At that time, with her eyes closed as she searched for the others, Lizzie made a try at getting out of her swimsuit. A very successful one too, given the circumstances. She was halfway there before Angie plucked her out of the water.

“No swimming in undies when company’s here,” Angie said, dragging Lizzie behind her up the pool’s stairs.

“Not fair. Why do you get to be in your undies?”

“It’s not underwear, you little Puritan. Come on, your butt’s going back in the house and back in that suit.”

Lizzie complained that she swam faster without the suit, that it was all just cheating to get her out of the game because she was a better finder than everyone else. Which she was. Her hearing wasn’t on par with Steve’s, but it wasn’t average either.

Angie was deaf to these protests, and dragged Lizzie inside.

The game broken up, Rindy drifted back to Abby, quite literally. She ended up floating on an inflatable raft someone brought over, which Abby tugged gently through the water. Rindy’s body had gone relatively still, but her mouth was another matter.

“He’s so _needy_ ,” Rindy said on a dramatic breath. At some point, she’d acquired a pair of cheap, plastic sunglasses, probably from Angie’s closet, one of the props Lizzie liked to play dress-up with. Rindy adjusted the glasses, the better to stare dolefully at the sky while expressing her life’s miseries. “Most of the time, nobody knows _what_ he needs. So he just cries and cries and cries, and it’s awful.”

Abby was making at least something of an attempt to hide her smile. She could’ve done worse. She could’ve done much, much better. “I’m sure it’s very difficult, but you’re doing the best you can. My brave, brave girl.”

Rindy sighed. “I am. But he’s not very fun. Daddy says it’s not his job to be fun for me, it’s his job to be a baby and grow. But he could try a little harder at being fun.”

“Of course.”

Rindy started talking about the evils of boy spit, but shut her mouth as soon as she heard the back door open. She turned her head sharply, saw Georgie closing it behind him. Her small chest lowered in an exhale.

“Keeping a lookout?” Abby asked.

Rindy shifted onto her stomach as Abby held the raft steady. She nodded. “For Lizzie.”

“And why is that?”

“Can’t complain about Sascha in front of Lizzie.”

“Honey, Lizzie would agree with you.”

“I _know_ ,” Rindy said, emphasizing the last word as though it were something horrible. “She told me this would happen. She told me it wasn’t fun being a big sister, and she’s a sore winner.”

“Oh, I see. Well, you still love him, right, even though he’s not so fun right now?”

“Yeah,” Rindy grumbled. “Mostly.”

“Isn’t that the most important thing?”

Rindy just stared at her.

“Yeah, I don’t buy it either. If we’re careful, I bet we can sneak in and grab those special earmuffs Lizzie has for Jake. That’ll make it a little quieter in the madhouse.”

Rindy brightened significantly at that. Therese, having watched the whole thing, laughed into Carol’s shoulder.

“You are a terrible influence on my child,” said Carol.

Abby hummed agreement, eyes twinkling. “You say the same thing about Therese.”

“Yes, because you’re on a campaign to ruin both of my girls.”

“All I’ve done is improve upon perfection. You’re welcome.”

Abby winked at Therese. Therese saw no reason not to wink back. Carol rolled her eyes as Abby’s focus suddenly went elsewhere, to Rose, who was reentering the pool after a break that’d involved sunning next to Angelo.

“Alright, kid, it seems the world wants to break us up,” Abby said. “Want to go see your moms for awhile?” She brought her head down closer to Rindy’s, lowered her voice. “We’ll talk strategy later, okay?”

“Okay,” Rindy said, very serious.

“Good girl. Hold tight,” Abby warned. Then she pushed the raft hard in Carol’s direction, and headed for Rose.

Carol let go of Therese with one hand, used it to stop the raft as it bumped into her hip. Rindy remained on her stomach, a goofy grin on her face. “Hi, Mommy.”

“Hi, Rindy. Are you having fun, sweetheart?”

“Yeah. I like this pool better than the one at the hotel, with Daddy and Mouse. All my friends are here, and we don’t have to share it with weird people.”

Carol leaned in close enough to whisper directly into Therese’s ear. “She likes this pool better than the one Harge and Lilah took her to.”

Therese pulled Carol’s face down for a brief peck on the cheek, took the opportunity to lean in herself, whisper back. “I’m more concerned that she thinks she’s not sharing this one with weird people.”

Carol laughed. Therese felt it against her. Therese had never been so content in so much water.

A door banged. Loudly. What followed was a sound Therese could only describe as a war cry.

The party’s collective attention was drawn to Lizzie. In her underwear, and shrieking almost loudly enough to drown out Angie’s calling of her full name, and curses in two languages. Even an almost was impressive when it came to out-yelling Angie.

Lizzie was doing much, much better at outrunning her. Her undies-clad body moved like a missile. Even as she ran, Therese could see her legs positioning themselves, readying to go from sprint to spring. She was headed straight for them.

Therese exchanged a horrified look with Carol. They’d both seen her at the playground on a rainy day. The swing set incident, the mud puddle that had no bottom.

Letting go of Carol for the first time in a long while, Therese instinctively brought her arms up to shield herself from the splash.

Something else came up as well. It all happened very fast and Therese’s eyes were partially covered, but she saw enough.

Steve, the “fucking merman,” as Carol had said, emerged from the water like a dolphin breaking the surface. He dived up instead of down, just as Lizzie launched herself off the ground and entirely out of reach of Angie’s threats.

Therese did not see what happened next. Steve’s move was more that of a whale than a dolphin, it turned out. The power behind it and his proximity to them created a mini tidal wave that hit them square on. Therese yelped. Carol cursed. Reflexively, Therese reached for Carol again as the water hit, afraid the sudden change in current would send her under.

Then she heard Rindy, and her instincts screamed a different order.

Battered by the shifting water Therese feared, the raft had overturned. Or Rindy had fallen off of it in her haste to brace for impact, Therese wasn’t sure. Regardless, Rindy was a girl overboard, kicking and sputtering furiously.

Without thinking about it, Therese let go of Carol to grab Rindy instead, hauling her out from under, pulling her close.

“I’ve got you,” Therese said-coughed. “I got you, I got you.”

It took only a few seconds to realize how silly the whole thing was. A few seconds to remember that Carol’s seven-year-old was a better swimmer than Therese was at twenty-two. To realize Rindy was sputtering in shocked indignation, nothing else. Still, for those few seconds before she came to her senses, saving Rindy from the watery clutches of death was all Therese cared about.

By the time she came to her senses, Steve was sitting nearby at the edge of the pool, his feet kicking serenely at the water. Lizzie was in his lap, and uncharacteristically unhappy to be there.

“Not fair, Daddy!” she pouted, swatting ineffectively at his chest.

He’d caught her in midair, Therese surmised. Kept her from executing the cannonball maneuver that would’ve soaked them. By soaking them with a small-scale tsunami instead.

“My glasses!” Rindy wailed in mournful rage at the cheap play sunglasses now floating at the bottom of the pool.

Steve whistled. Whistled. He stood up, still holding Lizzie with absolute grace. “Who’s up for burgers?” he asked. “I’m starved.”

“I want burgers!” Lizzie declared, forgetting her rage at being thwarted. “And hot dogs.”

“You don’t get anything if you don’t get your clothes on, and keep them there,” Steve replied. All cheer, he hoisted Lizzie over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. She faced the pool and party guests as she argued that point with Steve.

Carol put an arm around Therese, who was still holding Rindy. “Asshole,” she muttered, pushing soaked hair out of her face with her free hand.

If she was trying to keep the remark quiet (Therese didn’t think so), Carol failed. As evidenced by Abby’s reply. Abby was near the diving board with Rose, hadn’t been affected by the waves. “At least he’s an asshole with fabulous thighs. More than I can say for the last guy you liked to curse at.”

As digs against Harge went, it wasn’t subtle. As Abby Gerhard digs against Harge went, it absolutely was.

Angelo, who’d moved under a shaded table with Georgie, spoke up. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone the fake lesbian route, Abby. Thought you had more conviction than my sister.”

“Don’t be daft,” Abby said cheerfully. “Just because I don’t go there, doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the craftmanship. I don’t like football either, but when forced to endure it, I can tell the good players from the bad. And the exceptional from the good.”

“You damn lesbians. Can’t never stay in your own lane,” said Angelo, raising a bottle to his lips.

“You already got a lane, flyboy,” Georgie said. He too was staring at Steve’s departure. Which was still ongoing as the conversation took place.

“Doesn’t mean I can’t be protective of the view.” Angelo brought Georgie’s knuckles to his lips, kissed them. “Hey Steve! Be a pal and grab me another beer while you’re in there?”

Steve raised an arm in acknowledgement, still carting Lizzie over his shoulder.

* * *

“She is beyond exhausted,” Carol stated, reentering their bedroom.

“She’s not the only one,” Therese replied, untucking the covers they wouldn’t be using. She’d already changed into her lightest nightgown. She climbed into bed as Carol shut the door, but left it open a crack.

“We need to keep the damn air moving in this place,” Carol said, crossing to their dresser to change her own clothes. “Monday at the earliest, can you believe it? Honestly, we’ll roast by then.”

“We’ll be lucky to survive,” Therese said, smiling at Carol’s back.

Carol saw it in the mirror, turned, nightgown in hand. Her other hand went to her hip. “You’re mocking me.”

“I would never.”

“Therese Belivet.”

“You do know I never had air conditioning a day in my life until I lived with you? Somehow, I survived.”

Carol began shedding her clothes. “No wonder you were fine baking alive out there today. You deserved better then, and we deserve better now.”

“I don’t disagree. You’re still a spoiled Northerner.”

Carol half-turned, giving a view of her bare chest, along with her incredulous expression. “Northerner? As opposed to what? You’ve never even made it to Nebraska.”

They were meant to; Therese was meant to. They’d talked about continuing to Nebraska and beyond, had Harge and his detective stayed out of it, of that trip that changed everything. Sometimes the pain of that felt like a fresh wound, barely a day healed. Sometimes, like tonight, it felt very far away, just a bad dream they’d woken up from.

“I’m still better with the heat. And the cold,” said Therese. “And most minor inconveniences.”

Carol huffed and Therese giggled, content to watch Carol go about her nighttime routine. When that was done, Carol climbed into bed next to Therese. They lay on their sides facing each other, the bedsheet up to their knees. Much as Therese teased, it _was_ hot in here, and she too had gotten spoiled by the AC. It would make the most sense to retreat to their own sides of the bed, avoid shared body heat at all cost.

When had the ever made sense, by most people’s definitions?

“You seem happy,” Therese murmured, a smile free on her lips as she stroked Carol’s jaw, her cheek.

Carol caught Therese’s hand in a loose grip, kissed the knuckles before freeing it to roam again. “Why wouldn’t I be? I had a whole day with both of my favorite people.”

“And you got to see Peggy in a swimsuit.”

“And you got to see Angie in one,” Carol replied.

Therese closed her eyes as Carol ran lazy fingers along her side. “Yeah. That happened.”

“Yeah.”

A kiss landed on her bottom lip and Therese opened her eyes. Carol was closer now, and Therese didn’t complain. They touched each other gently, faces, hips. Intimate places, but not sexual, not yet. Their kisses were slow, soft, the heat in the room preventing much else. The minutes stretched. Therese sighed into Carol’s hands, her mouth.

When Carol kneaded her left breast, brought the nipple to attention, Therese made herself speak. “Carol?”

“Hmm?” Carol asked, toying with Therese’s breast.

“Do you think it’s bad that we get like this sometimes, after seeing Peggy and Angie?” The truth of it was, Therese hadn’t really minded all of that staring at the pool. She knew what it would lead to, or at least suspected. She’d found herself getting thoroughly fucked by Carol in a public bathroom when they went out to Peggy’s club, when Peggy wore that suit that covered everything but was still a sin, and Angie that dress that didn’t cover much.

Was it wrong to be turned on like this after spending a few hours with friends?

Carol’s frown was small and thoughtful, dying to be replaced by a smile. “Thoughts aren’t so bad, I think. Not if we only act on them with each other, don’t make anyone uncomfortable. Rose was practically toweling Peggy off, so I think we’re okay.”

“Okay,” said Therese, perfectly willing to be placated in this instance. She kissed Carol again felt that waiting smile against her lips.

“I did like,” Carol murmured, punctuating the words with more butterfly kisses, “the excuse to have you half-naked and pressed so close, all over me.”

Carol’s kisses were still soft, but her hands held more purpose, more intent. Therese slipped a leg between Carol’s. “You need an excuse for that?”

“When we’re not here, yes.” Carol skimmed a hand down Therese’s hip, bunching the material of her nightgown as she pulled it up. “It’s maddening,” she said, right in Therese’s ear.

Therese sighed into Carol’s neck, hooked her arms there. She pushed her knee up against Carol.

Carol gasped, mimicking Therese, moving her knee just so. “I thought you were exhausted,” Carol breathed, catching Therese’s earlobe between her lips.

“I am.” Therese was exhausted and burning up. “And if you are, then you need to move your hand.”

Said hand was on Therese’s ass, between skin and panties, holding Therese’s center against Carol’s knee.

“I’d rather not,” said Carol, pinching delicate skin and immediately soothing it with her thumb.

“Rindy,” Therese said reluctantly, because the door was cracked.

“Sleeping. Like a rock. As long as we’re quiet, we’re fine.”

A floor fan whirred on in the corner of the room, dragged from the closet when the AC broke. Therese still worried. She worried every time they risked it while Rindy was here. Besides the fact that getting caught would be absolutely mortifying, she was sure Harge would find out, and Harge finding out would be disastrous. Even the slightly kinder, slightly less infuriating Harge.

“Hey.” Carol tapped her cheek, waited until Therese was looking at her. “She hasn’t slept this hard since her birthday. Remember she was too excited to sleep the night before?”

Therese nodded.

“We’re okay, I promise. Trust me?”

Therese thought about it for half a second, then kissed her. She grabbed Carol’s knee with one hand, adjusted the position. Then she started to move.

The air was heavy. They set a slow, gentle rhythm, petting and kissing, rutting against each other. Their panties stayed on, and it felt different, that slight barrier between herself and Carol, but Therese didn’t mind. She’d been wrapped around Carol’s mostly bare body all day, floating. It didn’t take much to send her up again.

Carol’s hand was still on her ass, holding her in place. The other worked Therese’s clit, fast but soft. Therese, as she had earlier, clung to Carol. When she was close, she hid her whimpers in Carol’s mouth. When everything was too warm, too much and she couldn’t do that anymore, she pulled away, let go of Carol with one hand, brought the back of it to her mouth.

Carol tapped her knuckles after, gently brought the hand away. She kissed the top of it, where Therese had bitten softly, soothing marks that would be gone in a few minutes anyway.

“You’re beautiful,” Carol said, framing Therese’s face with both hands. “And red,” she added, mouth quirked.

Therese knew her cheeks were burning, probably her neck too. If she passed out from the heat, at least she’d have good reason. “So are you,” Therese said.

“Beautiful, or red?”

“Both.” And not finished, Therese knew, so she brought her hand down, fingers slipping under the waistband of Carol’s panties.

“Oh,” Carol said on a delighted, indrawn breath. “Yes.”

“Yes?” Therese pulled Carol’s head down, kissed her flushed cheeks. They bumped noses. The heat and the after effects had Therese uncoordinated and uncaring. She just wanted Carol to feel good. “What do you need?” She maneuvered her hand lower, closer to Carol’s entrance, prepared to get the underwear out of the way if she had to,

“Shhh,” Carol said, taking Therese’s wrist. “No, it’s okay, not tonight. Just rub me, just use your fingers there.”

“It’ll be enough?”

“Yes. You’re always enough.”

So Therese listened. She used her fingers on Carol’s clit, used her knee to add leverage, pressure. Carol called her darling and sweetheart and angel. When Carol came, she called her Therese.

The relief wasn’t earth-shaking, but it wasn’t meant to be, for either of them. It was too hot for that; they were too tired. There would be other nights. With the air restored, and without Rindy to worry over.

They kept more space than usual between them, but still held hands. Therese was well and truly worn out now, wanted nothing more than to sleep. “Carol?” she murmured, eyes closed against the dim light of bedside lamps never turned off.

“Hmm?”

“I think we need to shower again.”

Carol sighed. “I suppose we do,” she said, resigned.

Neither moved.

“If you weren’t so goddamn insatiable, we wouldn’t have these problems,” said Carol.

“And for that, you get the hallway bathroom, unless you want to wait for me to finish.”

“Or we could share.”

“Or we could not,” said Therese. She opened her eyes, moved enough to peck Carol on the lips. “I really am tired.”

“You really are no fun,” Carol said on a yawn.

“Oh? That was pure torture for you, was it? No fun at all?”

“Torture. Of the purest, most wonderfully impure kind.”

Therese smiled, disentangling herself from sheets that were long since kicked aside. She stood up, stepped out of her underwear in preparation for a quick, cool shower. “Fix the air conditioning and I’ll be fun again.”

Carol’s answer was a pillow hitting Therese’s bare ass.

* * *

“Think Jersey and Shutter know they only got soaked ‘cause you’re an asshole?”

Steve huffed out a breath. “I kept Lizzie from doing it.”

“So you could do it better.”

“I kept Lizzie from doing it,” he repeated.

Darkness had fallen late. The house was empty of everyone who didn’t live there. He and his wives had pushed some of the lounge chairs together in a makeshift bed. Peggy was tucked against Steve’s side, with Angie held against Peggy’s chest.

“They won’t know unless you tell them,” Peggy said, eyes closed as she dragged her fingers through Angie’s curls. “So of course, they will know.”

“Oh, totally,” said Angie.

Steve shrugged to himself. He’d jumped out of planes on covert ops more often than most swimmers jumped from diving boards. He could hit the water with virtually no evidence of his presence. He just chose not to sometimes.

He’d changed into comfortable shorts, put on a shirt, which Angie proceeded to unbutton as soon as she could. Peggy’s hair now tickled his bare chest.

Steve was content, in a way he hadn’t thought possible for most of his life.

And then there was the sound of Jake waking.

He shifted, squeezed Peggy’s shoulder. “Young master is up,” he said apologetically, his enhanced hearing easily finding the small noises that would soon become wails.

“Quite the needy little bugger, isn’t he?” said Peggy. “Hungry?”

Steve hummed. “I could grab him a bottle.”

“No, no.” Sitting up, Peggy left her spot in the middle, her resigned sigh taking more effort than her move to climb over him. “He never wants the plastic when he knows he can have the real thing.”

“Can you blame him?” Angie asked, scooting closer to Steve so she could catch Peggy’s wrist. “Hurry back, English.”

Peggy squeezed Angie’s hand in both of hers. “No promises, darling. He takes longer at the breast than either of you. Which is quite the feat.”

“What are we supposed to do without you, huh?”

“You have my complete permission to entertain yourselves any way you see fit. I’ll catch up.”

“You always do,” said Angie.

“Always,” Peggy replied, a promise accompanied by a smirk as she stroked her fingers over Angie’s cheekbone before leaving.

It was Angie’s turn to heave a sigh. “Miss her already.”

“Always,” Steve agreed.

They shared their misery with a kiss and then another, another. Angie tasted like the alcohol she’d mixed into her lemonade.

After a moment, Angie mirrored Peggy, hauling her body over Steve’s. Unlike Peggy, Angie wasn’t aiming to extricate herself. She sat down on his lower stomach, brushed a curl from her eyes.

Steve’s breath skipped. She’d changed back into her discarded dress earlier, hadn’t bothered putting anything on after tossing her bikini in the wash. Her bare crotch rested comfortably against his stomach muscles.

“Hey there, Soldier,” she said.

Steve put a hand on her hip to steady her, the other on her lower back. “Hey, beautiful.” He smiled with a mixture of amusement and arousal as Angie began mapping his body. Her fingers danced with varying pressure along his abs, his ribs, his chest. She circled her index finger near his left nipple and his chest jerked under her.

Angie’s grin was filthy, devilish. “Ticklish. They don’t say that in the museum exhibits.”

“They don’t say a lot of things,” said Steve, while Angie raked her nails along his arms. “You looking for something there, Ange?” he asked, because he’d been with her almost ten years, and he thought and hoped she was.

“Mmm.” She squeezed along his upper arms, slowly working her way down. She shifted herself at the same time, her crotch dragging down his body until she was sitting on the bulge of his shorts. “Oh look, there it is.”

“There it is.” The lounge chair had him partially leaned back. Steve sat up, pulling Angie into a kiss.

Her hands kept wandering, toying at his shirt. When he went to take it off, Angie uttered a soft but insistent “no,” nipping his lower lip with her teeth while exploring his exposed chest with her palms.

Okay, shirt stayed on. He was fine with that.

Steve harbored no illusions that this enjoyment of toned muscles was limited exclusively to his. He’d seen Angie salivating over Peggy’s arms and thighs far too many times for that. Not that he blamed her. When he’d first met Peggy, he’d been smaller than Therese Belivet, and immediately aware of Peggy’s ability to bench-press him.

His attraction was instant.

No, Steve didn’t mind that Angie loved rubbing all over Peggy’s body just as much as she did his. Quite the opposite. Watching Angie do this with Peggy was one of his favorite things, and he was, very briefly, annoyed with his son for taking that opportunity. The passing thought was blown entirely out of his head by Angie’s next words.

“Give a girl a ride, sweetheart?”

Steve sucked in a breath as Angie bounced teasingly against him. “Guess that depends where you’re headed. Sweetheart.”

“Oh, somewhere real, real nice, unless you want me giving your CO a bad report.”

Considering how much relish Peggy was known to have for that particular game, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. But the alternative provided a more immediate gratification, for both of them.

Steve rucked up Angie’s dress, exposing her strong dancer’s thighs to the night air. His hand found her ass, kneaded there while his other hand helped her undo the zipper of his shorts. He lifted her with ease, just enough that he could free his dick from the confines of the material.

Angie went back to kissing him senseless, her most intimate areas teasing against his in the act. Steve was rapidly losing all of his considerable abilities of rational thought.

“You got a rubber?” Angie asked between kisses, one of her hands finding his hair.

With effort, Steve dragged rational thought back, hopefully for the last time in the next little while. “Not on me, no.”

“Obviously not on you, or I wouldn’t ask.”

Angie’s tug on his hair only fueled Steve further. “Smartass.” He kissed her, touched between her legs, gratified when she sucked in a breath as he gathered wetness on his fingers.

Angie’s thumb ran down the underside of his shaft, a barely there touch. “Thought you soldier boys always had rubbers.”

“Not during peace time.” Steve took himself in hand, used firm up and down motions he knew Angie wouldn’t, not this early. His other hand stayed between Angie’s folds, playing there. “We don’t have to.” Fast as he was, Steve didn’t think he could separate from Angie now, much as it would undoubtedly amuse Peggy to see him half-hard and fumbling for a condom like an ill-prepared teenager.

“We really, really do. Lizzie would kill us all in our sleep if we even thought of another baby.” Angie teased his balls with her fingers, through the confines of the shorts.

“How are you still such a smartass right now?” he asked, mostly to distract himself from the beautiful misery her touch inflicted.

“Talent, doll.” Angie kissed him. “Shutter and Jersey are lucky.”

Steve blinked. Blood was quickly leaving his brain, headed straight down. “We’re talking about Therese and Carol? Now?”

“I’m just saying. Gals with gals don’t need rubbers. One less thing to worry about.”

“Uh-huh.” Steve used two fingers on Angie’s clit, in the just so way he knew would steal her voice, at least momentarily. “We don’t need them either.” He worked his thumb over her, smirking as she gulped air. His point made, he watched the pulse in her neck speed up with his fingers. Then he leaned up to kiss it instead, feel it against his tongue.

Angie moaned, tugging his hair again and tilting her neck for better access. She let her head fall forward to his shoulder, face in his neck as he pressed his mouth to hers. She used her free hand to grip his shoulders under the shirt, nails digging in hard.

The scratches would heal almost before they formed. That was why Angie liked this so much. Not that Angie was unduly delicate with Peggy, but Peggy, despite the legends, was only human. Angie had seen her cut up and bleeding far too many times, most of them while Steve was still in the ice and unable to provide support to either of them. Angie wasn’t normally this rough with Peggy not because Peggy couldn’t take it, but because Angie couldn’t.

So Steve let her mark him, however fleetingly. More than let her, he reveled in it. He loved Angie like this, hot everywhere, wet on his fingers, invading every one of his sharpened senses. His fingers teased at her entrance, ready to slip inside, feel the muscles there, but Angie pulled back.

“Uh-uh,” she said. There was no rebuke in it. “Don’t want that tonight.”

Steve backed off of her neck so he could look her in the eyes. “No?”

“No.” She reached down, tugged on him gently with a wicked smirk. “We can still do this. Just nothing on me or in me, babe.”

Steve’s eyebrows climbed. “Nothing in you? Nothing at all?”

“Shut up and fuck me before the bigger kid wakes up.”

“God, you’re so romantic,” said Steve, and then he listened.

Angie was tight and hot, and everything around him. She pushed him backwards in the chair so he was back to half-reclining. Her hands resumed their exploration of his chest while she rode him with intent. Steve kept one hand on her lower stomach, his thumb finding her clit every time she thrust down on him. His other hand switched between her breasts, which he regretted neglecting up to now. He regretted more that simple summer dress she looked so casually beautiful in. It was in the way, but Angie showed no interest in removing it, and he didn’t fully trust himself to get rid of it now without tearing it.

At least Angie had skipped out on all forms of underwear when she changed out of her swimsuit, including a bra.

Angie had the most expressive face of anyone he’d ever known. She wore her emotions on her sleeve, and her facial expressions were a joy to behold. Except when she was mad at him, which she wasn’t now. Now she was using him to chase her orgasm, with the same focus she’d used to pursue her Broadway career. And Peggy. She writhed atop him, twisting and pulling at the edges of his unbuttoned shirt. She smelled like sweat and sex as she confined her pleasure to small, controlled sounds. When she couldn’t manage that, she’d pull him forward by his shirt and kiss beautiful, obscene noises into his mouth.

Steve was so enamored that the orgasm almost snuck up on him. Angie was still riding him, and he realized suddenly that one or two more thrusts would do it. If her inner muscles clenched down on him one more time, he might very well breach the agreement, and be subjected to Angie’s angry face, which he was sure would be so much worse if she were denied an orgasm while his spilled over.

He grabbed her hip, stalled her progress, earning an adorable whine of a noise. “Sorry,” he croaked, a ragged noise as he pulled out of her with far less grace than he would’ve liked. That produced an equally ragged, desperate sound from Angie, one he felt vaguely guilty for enjoying.

Repeating his apology. Steve pumped roughly over his shaft. He came within seconds, careful to aim away from Angie. It really was a nice dress, and she wouldn’t appreciate the stain.

He shuddered into his own hands, kept going until he was utterly spent. He laid back in the lounger, waiting for his breath to return, eyes closed until he felt a hand on his cheek.

“Not very like you,” Angie said, amusement in her voice.

Steve opened his eyes. “Been a long day, and that bikini suits you.”

He usually tried his best not to finish before his partner (or partners) did. But they’d been running around in swimwear all day, and there wasn’t a thing Steve could do about it with so many people here. Slightly superhuman or not, even he had limits.

Angie chuckled, kissed him. Her hand pressed against his speeding heart. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said, snuggling close to rest her head under his chin.

“It was,” Steve replied, every nerve firing as Angie accidentally brushed against him. Or non-accidentally. It was always hard to tell with her. “Give me two minutes,” he said, wrapping an arm around her.

“Mmm.” Angie ghosted a lazy kiss near his collarbone. “Great reload speed. Take your time, baby, I can keep myself occupied.”

‘Occupied,’ as it turned out, meant rubbing between her legs, pinching and tugging gently at her clit. The wet sounds this produced were sharper for him than they’d be for anyone else, starting at his eardrums and traveling straight to his dick.

“Okay, I’m good,” he said after barely a minute of stroking himself back to attention.

He helped her reposition herself, sink back down, only to immediately have her pull almost all the way up, all the way out. Her forehead creased with pleasure as she moved down again, slow. She liked that initial feeling of connection, hadn’t made time to savor it during the first round.

“Yeah,” Angie said under her breath. “Fuck.”

She gripped his chest again, one hand in his shirt, the other leaving half moon crescents on his skin. “You’re beautiful,” Steve said, Angie stealing his breath almost as soon as he had it back. “Go for it, honey.”

Angie kissed him hard, put up no argument. Color rose high in her cheeks under the darkened sky, her expression pinched in effort and ecstasy. Steve rolled his hips to help her along, delighting in the looks and sounds of Angie during sex. She showed no restraint beyond keeping things quiet, fucked herself on him just the way she liked.

When she was close and Steve knew it, he grabbed a handful of her hair, held the back of her head. Not enough to hurt, only to hold her in place, keep this one part of her still. Part of it was for him, wanting to watch her, but he also knew that small loss of control right before she was about to lose it completely wasn’t unwelcome.

He was proven right moments later. Angie came as she usually did, a shuddery mess of spasms and swear words, her body chasing every last second of the orgasm. Steve helped her through it, rubbed her clit until she swatted his hand away. Then she fell forward, a tangle of spent limbs burrowing into his arms.

Steve kissed her hair, her ears, rubbed her back. “So good, honey,” he murmured. “That was perfect, you did so good.”

He’d been surprised during their earliest explorations at how well and how much Angie sometimes reacted to praise. He hadn’t figured her as the type who needed validation in the bedroom.

“I’m an actress,” she’d said with typical lack of embarrassment. “I like applause.”

He whispered to her now as she settled, ignoring the throbbing she’d reignited in him. Soon, she said that it was too hot and backed out of the circle of his arms. Steve wasn’t entirely successful in biting back his curse when she eased off him.

“Love you,” Angie said, still in his lap.

“You too,” Steve replied, eyes closed. They shot open again as soon as Angie stroked under the head of his dick. _“Christ_. _”_

Angie smirked. “Well. You did tear a giant hole into our yard without telling me, but it’s a nice hole. Be pretty rude for me to send you in with a tent in your pants.”

Steve let out a strained laugh.

Saying something about reliving her high school days, Angie repositioned so she could rock against him. Her actions weren’t nearly as energetic as before, but she was a big believer in working smart, not hard. Even just bumping against him, she didn’t have to do much. She’d gotten him most of the way there by getting there herself.

She did help him along with her words, saying sweet, filthy things as she moved. Her repertoire of dirty talk only covered two languages, far less than what he or Peggy were capable of, but this was hardly a deficiency. The languages she’d mastered, she’d truly mastered.

Steve came a second time, mostly managing to keep his word on keeping it off of Angie. His abs took most of the mess, not that he cared very much in those first few moments.

“Did you…?” he asked, letting the question hang while he recovered. He’d felt her shuddering, heard the changes in her breathing that signaled she was at least enjoying herself while helping him.

Angie shook her head, but smiled, kissed the edge of his mouth as he got his breath back. “Too hot. For those of us who actually feel that. But it was still the good kind of hot.”

Steve chuckled. “Yeah, yeah it was. You okay?”

“You looking to square up, Soldier? Maybe wake me early tomorrow, before the kids get up.”

“You hate when I wake you up early.”

“That is almost entirely dependent on how you choose to do it.”

“Got it,” he said, the ideas already swirling. He looked down as Angie eased off of him, sighed at the mess on his stomach. “I don’t suppose we left any towels out here?”

“Nope. Lizzie was using the last one as a cape. We really should make her quit that Superman show. She thinks it’s socially acceptable to run around in undies and a cape now.” Angie stood on surprisingly steady legs, adjusting her dress.

“She’d learn the same lesson from Uncle Howard anyway, and she’d be mad at us for taking her show.” Lacking a better option, Steve sat up, shrugging his shirt off.

“Men are disgusting,” Angie said without malice. “Therese is so lucky she’s such a lesbian. Never had to deal with that.”

“Why do you think I stick to girls?” Steve deadpanned, using his shirt as an impromptu towel.

“That’s hardly been a lifetime thing.”

“Recently, then.”

“’Cause I told you I didn’t want Howard in my bed, on any level, including by proxy? Or because you got tired of doing twice the cleanup?”

“You can only sacrifice so many shorts and socks at war, Ange,” he told her.

“I see. So you went straight for the same reason you’ve made so many other sacrifices. Patriotism.”

“I had scoliosis before the serum. I’ve literally never been straight a day in my life.” Quickly, Steve made as if to throw the soiled shirt at Angie. She let out a tiny scream, raising her arms defensively.

She glared upon realizing the fake-out, that he still held the shirt. “Nice one, Quasimodo. Boys are so gross.”

Steve laughed. That pool was truly one of his best investments.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I did say longer waits, yeah? But, but, but also longer updates, and this…definitely counts as that. Like, this chapter’s longer than the entirety of some of the multi-chapter entries in this series because, well because I like hurting myself, I guess.
> 
> No, there is a reason, at least for the general format, I just didn’t have the time/inclination to get into it last chapter. Two things, basically. One, I’m doing it for myself. I’m trying to do an actual, non-fanfic project at the moment, which means actually finishing the thing before major edits, real feedback, etc. My brain likes the instant gratification, and my brain also could’ve split this chapter multiple times for the sake of me and my compulsive need for comments/validation. I really can’t tell you how many times I ended a chapter earlier than I meant to because I underestimated the amount of words involved in getting from A to B. But, trying not to do that because of the aforementioned non-fanfic project, so there’s reason one.
> 
> Reason two is me moving the timeline along without doing some biggish time skip. As it stands, it’s taken me about 2 years of real time to do one year in fic time, which is fine, but I do have things I want to get to, without skipping too far ahead with too much happening offscreen.
> 
> So there you go, long ramblings from me, long chapter, long wait…it’s a theme. This one is, there’s a lot going on, and I really wanted to get it as right as I possibly could. Next chapter should not be nearly as long, but I’m also me so…yes, I’m me.  
> Comments and kudos are always appreciated, love all of you guys, thanks for hanging in with me here.

“I’ve finally figured it out,” Carol declared. “The best place for me to be while supporting Therese and her beliefs is miles away, in front of a pool.”

Peggy laughed. “Yes, in matters of faith, when given the choice between having a man yammer on at me about how another man wants me to live, I much prefer the pool.”

They were ten days into June, and Carol, for the millionth time, was extremely glad Therese didn’t push her about church. Therese continued to go sporadically, with Steve, Angie and the kids. Carol’s old wounds made her reluctant, but she hoped one day to accompany Therese. For her sake, not Therese’s. Therese wouldn’t force her into anything, but Carol did want to, someday. Because it was important to Therese, because Carol wanted to prove to herself that she could, that she wasn’t ruled by the lies of a few falsely pious old men who insisted she was a monster.

One day, Carol would feel good enough to go along, share in that part of Therese’s life at least once.

That day was not today, and Carol was perfectly content with that. It was far too hot to be penned in with mostly strangers for over an hour, to wrangle Lizzie and Rindy. Carol much preferred the alternative: a lounger in front of Peggy’s pool, a fresh mimosa at the ready, and Jacob Rogers happily cuddling against her.

“He does like you,” Peggy observed from the chair next to Carol’s. She reclined comfortably, a magazine in her lap but ignored as she watched the other two.

“He’s a sweetheart,” said Carol, kissing the top of his head. “And he’s getting hair,” she added, running her fingers over the scattered wisps that’d sprouted.

Peggy rolled her eyes. “I should’ve made an appearance in God’s house to thank Him for that one, at least. If only He’d speed things along so Lizzie stops trying to color Jacob’s head with a marker.”

“Would hair really stop her from doing that?”

Peggy sighed. “I suppose we’ll find out. What about Rindy and Sascha, how’s that going?”

“She complains, but not nearly as much as Lizzie.”

“Sorry I asked.”

“She adores him though, really. Keeps one of his baby pictures in her room at the apartment, it’s very sweet.”

“Good to hear. And good to see more of her.”

“Tell me about it. Next weekend will be the first in awhile that we haven’t had her.”

Carol couldn’t easily remember the last time Harge cancelled one of their visits, and it was a surprising and beautiful realization.

“I was sure he’d take her from me on Mother’s Day, give it to Lilah.” He hadn’t, however, despite it being his new bride’s first Mother’s Day. He’d only told Rindy that they would celebrate with Lilah later. And he’d shown up at the apartment with chocolates in hand for Carol. Almost all of them were the kind she wasn’t fond of, and ended up going to Rindy and Therese. Whether this was a backhanded gift, or Harge genuinely not knowing her basic tastes after ten years together, Carol didn’t know. Her girls had enjoyed the candy, at any rate.

“I heard,” said Peggy. “Is Therese’s card still up?”

“I imagine it will be up until next year,” Carol replied, filled with warmth at the thought.

She always loved Mother’s Day, with Therese going all out to help Rindy ‘surprise’ her with breakfast in bed. This year though, it was Therese who got the biggest surprise. A homemade card from Rindy, one of three. Carol’s was the obligatory one made at school, with two more created at home. A part of Carol still rebelled at Lilah receiving an offering, but it was a very immature, very Harge-esque part that she was doing her best to control. An endeavor helped along by the fact that Lilah was still Mouse on her card, while Therese got to be Mama.

Rindy hadn’t asked Carol first. Aunt Therese was Mama now and that was that. Carol was just as surprised as Therese when Rindy presented her gift, and was beyond thankful that she knew enough about Therese’s fancy camera (purchasing it didn’t mean she knew more than the basics of how it worked) to snap several photos of Therese’s reaction, of the tearful hugs that followed.

“You’ll be alright next weekend without her?” Peggy asked.

Carol held Jake a little closer. “I’ll miss her, but I always do. Things aren’t nearly as bad as they were. They’re almost fair, even.” As close to fair as she ever expected to get with Harge. “And Father’s Day, it’s only right that he gets her. It’ll give Therese and I a chance to get away, anyway.”

They took a small trip every year on Father’s Day weekend, a miniature vacation for the two of them. It kept Carol’s mind off of Rindy, as much as that was possible, gave her a chance to enjoy Therese.

Last year they’d gone up to Connecticut to visit with friends they’d met through Steve and Peggy. With their son, who Therese had met by chance while spending time with Dannie. It really was an impossibly small world, and the boy knew a lot about writing, and about art, the latter of which had become something of a secondary passion for Therese. Besides that, there were certain shared lifestyle choices in common.

“Where to this year?” Peggy asked.

“I’m not sure yet. We’ve both been so swamped with work lately; we haven’t gotten to talk about it much. I’m looking forward to it regardless.”

They'd been invited back by Byrne's mothers with a fully open invitation this year as well, but Carol was half tempted to drag Therese someplace where people weren’t so preoccupied with the art of tying knots. Last year was educational and not at all unpleasant, but Carol had learned that hearing about these things made her quite impatient to do them, and that was easier within the safety of their own apartment.

“I’m sure. Any room for a third wheel?”

Carol looked at her curiously. “Why?”

“Father’s Day. The Martinelli house.,” Peggy said, as if that explained anything.

“Since when are you bothered by holidays with the Italian Armada?”

“Some holidays, since always. Have I not mentioned that?”

“There are a lot of things you don’t mention, Peggy.”

Peggy tilted her head in acknowledgement. “True,”

“What’s wrong with Father’s Day?”

Peggy opened her mouth to answer, got delayed. There was the sound of a car in the driveway, quickly followed by the much more insistent noises of slamming doors and excited children. Lizzie and Rindy arrived first, followed by Steve, Therese and Angie.

Greetings were exchanged. Therese sat herself on the edge of Carol’s lounger, kissed her. A simple thing that Carol especially treasured around these three friends, the ability to be herself with the woman she loved.

“Look, English,” said Angie. “There’s a chubby little monster baby, how in the world did he get in?”

“I’ve no idea,” Peggy replied with her usual dry fondness. “I was just about to try pawning him off on dear Carol here.”

“We’re good, thanks,” Carol said, passing Jake over to Angie, who blew a loud raspberry against his stomach, sending him into a fit of giggles.

“Are you sure?” Peggy asked as Angie sat next to her. “As you see, he’s quite adorable, he’d match that couch of yours perfectly.”

“One’s enough, for now,” Carol deadpanned as Lizzie and Rindy chased each other too close to the pool’s edge, Rindy still in her good shoes, the ones she hated walking in but somehow thought running in was a good idea. “Nerinda Abigail!”

Rindy skidded without stopping. “Mommy! It’s not nice to use Aunt Abby’s name to be mean to me.”

“It’s your name too.”

“Only when you’re grumpy.”

“Exactly, so slow down.”

“We’re fine, Mommy, promise.”

Lizzie chose that moment to feint to the left. Surprised, Rindy went forward with her momentum, crashing into Lizzie. They both teetered on the brink for long moments, about to crash into the water. Then Steve picked them both up by their elbows, carrying them several feet back.

“Hey. Watch yourselves, you two, you got it?”

“Daddy!” Lizzie exclaimed with the same gleefulness she did every time Steve saved her from disaster. “Can we go swimming?”

“Not in church clothes. And not in your undies either,” Steve added as Lizzie opened her mouth. She closed it, scowling, and Steve smiled, setting them both down. “Be good, I mean it.”

“We’ll be good,” Lizzie promised.

Seconds later, they were running wild again.

Carol sighed as Therese leaned into her side, laughing. “Don’t encourage her,” she admonished, pinching Therese’s shoulder. She looked at Angie and Peggy across from them, at Steve approaching. “My baby girl was far less reckless before she met yours.”

“Don’t look at me,” said Peggy, Jake watching the movement of her typically red-painted lips. “I had no direct involvement with that one.”

Angie snorted. “Not how I remember it, Pegs.”

Peggy waved her off. “You were rather distracted, as I recall.”

“That’s a word for it. You really want to play the biology card whenever it’s convenient?”

“It’s worked well enough so far.”

“Fine,” Angie said as Jake reached for the shiny part of one of her favorite necklaces. “Biologically speaking, it’s Steve’s fault our kid’s a reckless idiot,” she continued, with the usual affection of a Martinelli insulting their child.

“My recklessness is responsible for the continuation of the Martinelli line, thank you,” said Steve. He nudged Angie until she scooted over enough for him to sit next to her.

“It’s funny how you think that’s a good thing,” said Angie, tugging playfully on his tie.

“I’m confused,” said Therese. “More than I usually am around you.”

“Oh, I would be so happy to clarify,” said Steve, grinning.

“Don’t let him clarify,” said Peggy. “He only clarifies when he’s being annoying.”

"You know what my first act as Captain America was? Not as the stage guy, but my first heroic act?"

Carol looked at Therese, who looked back at her.

“I haven’t been to your museum in awhile,” said Therese.

“I didn’t pay enough attention during the war,” said Carol. “As long as there wasn’t another Pearl Harbor and I didn’t have anyone at my door telling me Harge was dead, I assumed things were fine.”

“You want to take a guess?” Steve asked, eyes twinkling.

Angie began muttering in Italian.

"I jumped out of a plane, behind enemy lines, to chase after 150 men who were being held hostage and experimented on by Hydra. I saved every last one of them—”

"You went there for Bucky.”

“Every last one of them,” Steve repeated, speaking over Angie. “And do you know why that’s important?”

“Dramatic asshole,” said Angie, “acting like you hated showbusiness so much, like it wasn’t a perfect fit.”

“I got to save someone named Angelo Martinelli. Only to, years later, be belittled --"

“You’re such a dick.”

“Mocked, utterly betrayed—”

“Bite me, winghead.”

“By his beloved eldest daughter.”

Angie muttered in Italian. Peggy rolled her eyes.

“You’re kidding,” said Therese after a long moment of wide-eyed staring.

“I never kid about a mission.”

“He does,” said Peggy. “All the time.”

“Your father,” Therese pointed at Angie, “was a Howling Commando?”

“He was in the 107th,” said Angie. “107th was and is technically a whole company. It’s just that Gabe, Morita, the guys you met, they’re the reckless idiots you hear most about, the ones led around by this reckless idiot.” Angie punched Steve’s chest. “That name, the Commandos, didn’t come along until the Captain Asshole here, and Papa was home by then.”

“Thanks to Captain Asshole himself,” said Steve.

“Yeah, yeah.” Angie tugged on his tie again, kissed him. “Reckless idiot.”

“Remember what my reckless idiocy got you, sweetheart. Non essere ingrato, principessa."

“Sì, quella volta eri spericolato e ho guadagnato tre fratelli piccoli. Grazie per quello, avevo davvero bisogno di più Fratelli,” Angie shot back in what Carol could only assume was perfect Italian.

"E una sorella. Ti piace la sorella."

"Sei ancora uno stronzo."

Therese stared between them as they bickered. “I hate it when you guys do this, you know,” she said.

“Seconded,” said Carol.

Peggy tickled under Jake’s chin as he squirmed in Angie’s arms. “They’re debating whether recklessly saving Angie’s father’s life makes Steve an asshole or not.”

“I thought you didn’t speak Italian?” said Carol.

“I don’t.”

“I don’t regret rescuing him,” said Steve. “I do at times regret agreeing to fall for you."

"Agreeing. Please. You saw me and fell flat on your face. Done deal, in the first minute.”

"Tripped over my own feet most likely. Do you believe this, Jacob?” Steve lifted the baby out of Angie’s arms. “Daddy saved Nonno, got you all those uncles and an aunt, and this is the thanks he gets?”

“Your thanks will be twenty pounds of Italian food come Sunday.” Peggy visibly shuddered. “Dear God, the bloating.”

“I don’t bloat,” said Steve.

“I do,” Peggy replied.

“Is that why you don’t want to do Father’s Day?” Carol asked. “Bloating and gloating?”

“She tried to get out of it?” said Angie, suddenly gleeful. She slapped Steve’s jacket pocket. “You owe me five bucks, hero.”

“As if that was ever in doubt,” said Steve. “You are not getting out of this,” he added. “If I have to suffer, so do you.”

“Oh she’s for sure not getting out of it,” said Angie. “Whatever she’s promised you, Jersey, forget about it.”

“She hadn’t promised me anything yet,” said Carol, looked at Peggy. “Were you going to promise me something?”

“You’ll never know now, will you?” Peggy sighed heavily, slumped down in the lounger like a lady of leisure wilting in the heat.

“She doesn’t want to go because she’s a hero too, and she hates it,” said Steve.

“What does being a hero have to do with it?” Therese asked. “Everyone knows you’re a hero.”

“Not helping,” said Peggy.

“Thank you,” said Angie.

“This one,” Peggy nudged Angie’s side with her foot, “and her family seem to think I‘m the reason Angelo the Senior made it home from the war.”

“Are you?” Carol asked.

“Not at all. I only did my job.”

“Someone had to interview all those men I came back with,” said Steve. “Find out what they went through, what shape they were in, decide what happened to them next. "

"Several someones," Peggy said.

"And you were one of those someones. I got Angelo away from Hydra, but Peggy got him away from the Front.”

“It was my job,” Peggy said. “I stamped some paperwork. Nothing else.”

“It was more than that and you know it,” said Angie, voice softening. “It was everything to us.”

“I do know. I’ve been reminded every Father’s Day for the last ten years, and on Angelo’s birthdays.”

“Well enjoy being reminded again, because your Papa’s favorite daughter-in-law, so buck up and take it like a woman,” said Angie.

“I’m his only daughter-in-law,” Peggy replied, exasperated. Still, she took the hand Angie held out for her.

“I rescued him too,” said Steve, “but I’m not favorite son-in-law.”

“That’s because Georgie is a perfect gem of a person,” said Angie. “No one can be expected to beat Georgie.”

“Fair enough,” Steve conceded, bouncing Jake in his arms.

“Please, Therese, Carol. Do a kindness for a wounded war hero,” said Peggy. “Take me with you, away from all this.”

“Don’t do it,” said Angie. “She’s a terrible backseat driver, you’ll be tearing your hair out after twenty miles.”

“Slander,” said Peggy. “You slander me.”

“What about your father?” Therese asked. “Don’t you ever spend it with him?” She paused, considered. “Do you have Father’s Day there?”

“They do,” said Angie, “but Peggy’s dad is an asshole.”

It was said in that way Angie had of saying things, that made it impossible to tell how serious she was being. “Is he?” asked Carol

“He’s British,” said Peggy. “And that’s not a terrible idea, Therese.”

“I try my best,” Therese deadpanned.

“Would you really hop on a ship and spend days at sea just to avoid my family?” Angie asked.

“I’ve taken much more extreme measures to avoid mine.”

“You saved him, that means you get to deal with him. Them’s the rules, honey,” Angie declared.

“Those rules were not outlined in any of the paperwork I signed.”

Steve chuckled. “You have your camera, Therese, want to document this? Years on the front lines, still saves the world on a daily basis—”

“Rogers,” Peggy cut in sharply. “You most definitely signed paperwork prohibiting that talk.”

“—and it’s spending a night with a phone line technician that has her running scared.”

“Not _a_ night, just this one in particular.” Peggy’s gaze landed on Carol and Therese. “Come on, darlings. We’ll run away together. I promise it’ll be worth it.”

Carol shared a look with Therese. It really wasn’t fair, that tone, those eyes, how tempting the offer had suddenly become.

“No, nope, uh-uh,” said Angie, snapping her fingers and then covering Peggy’s eyes. “Don’t let her work her voodoo magic on you. If you take her with, you don’t get to hear all about how miserable she was later.”

Carol exchanged another look with Therese. “True,” she said with a shrug.

Huffing in annoyance, Peggy swatted Angie’s hand away from her face. “Traitors. The whole goddammed lot of you,” she declared before slumping down in her chair in a pose that brought to mind Lizzie after a tantrum.

* * *

“One of Abby’s former conquests has a cabin upstate,” Carol said while clearing the table of their dinner dishes. “A beautiful view, I’ve been told, and right on the lake. It must’ve been one of Abby’s better breakups, because we have the place if we want it.”

They’d left the Carter-Martinelli-Rogers home early in the afternoon, spent the rest of the day with Rindy. Harge had picked her up in the middle of dinner, which wasn’t ideal, but barely qualified as an annoyance when compared to how these handoffs used to go.

Carrying their plates to the sink, Carol watched as Therese frowned over the bowl she was rinsing. Coming up alongside her, Carol dipped her head to kiss the top of Therese’s, nudging shoulders with her. “Hello in there.”

“Hmm?” Therese looked up. She took the dishes, set them in the sink. “I’m sorry. What were you saying?”

If it were Harge, Carol would be annoyed at least, infuriated at most. With Therese, she was only amused. “Asking. I was asking if we want it.”

Therese blinked, frowned. “Sure?”

It was an obvious guess, and Carol laughed. “I don’t know where your head is, but you could be in a lakeside cabin with me next weekend. I would’ve thought that’d be of more interest to you.”

“Oh.”

Just one syllable, but there was no missing the tone. “No swimming this time, if you don’t want it, I promise,” said Carol, making her own guess at what the problem was.

Therese smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. She didn’t answer.

“Angel?” Carol touched her arm.

“It sounds nice, Carol, really.”

“But?”

Therese stared into the sink as if the answer to whatever she struggled with would come crawling out of the drain. She twisted the taps all the way to the right, dried her hands on a dishtowel. Familiar, beautiful eyes met Carol’s. “Would you mind terribly if we skipped the cabin?”

Carol was surprised, but perhaps that was her own fault. She’d thought it was work and exhaustion that kept them from discussing the details of their trip, but maybe there was more to it. When she’d talked about it with Angie earlier (after Peggy finished telling them all what traitors they were), Therese had gotten up, gone off to play with the children. Carol hadn’t thought anything of it then.

“Not terribly, no. Did you want to stay in this year?” Carol asked.

Therese picked up the dishtowel again, worrying it between her fingers. “Not exactly.”

“I’m not a mind reader, Therese.” Carol took the towel from Therese’s hands, making sure to give them a squeeze as she did. Setting the towel aside, she held There’s gaze. “Where are you? Where would you like to be?”

Therese looked at her for a moment more, then realigned their hands so she was holding just one of Carol’s. Wordlessly, she led them out of the kitchen. Carol, thoroughly confused, followed without question.

She couldn’t imagine not following Therese.

They didn’t go far, only to the living room, the mantle. Therese used her free hand to graze across Rindy’s Mother’s Day card to her. Carol saw a smile pull at her lips even now, weeks after the giving. The picture showed Therese and Rindy in a park, by a fountain. Therese had her camera around her neck, to photograph the structure. Rindy was next to her, smiling and holding her own camera. One that did not in fact exist. Rindy would sometimes practice on Therese’s old one, but lacked her own. A hint, probably, since Rindy’s camera was filled in with her favorite color, not at all what the real one looked like.

Carol’s card, the only one of three Rindy could ever make at school, showed the two of them together behind the shop counter, Rindy playing the role of cashier. She’d bragged to the teacher and her classmates, Harge said, about Mommy’s shop.

Seeing both cards next to each other, in pride of place, warmed Carol even as she fought her concern for Therese.

“I’ve been,” Therese started, eyes flitting between Carol and the cards. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately, I suppose.”

Therese’s palm was sweaty in hers, her fingers twisting and restless. “That’s nothing new,” Carol replied, “Tell me?”

“I’ve been thinking,” Therese repeated, “about my father.”

Of all the things Carol might have expected, that wasn’t on the list. It’d taken years together and that awful mess at the paper (where she was meant to be Therese’s aunt) for Carol to even learn the details of how Therese’s father died, how affected she’d been by it. Therese hadn’t talked about him much before then, or since.

“It’s odd, I know,” said Therese, as if reading Carol’s mind. “It’s just, all this stuff in the last year or so, that nonsense about Steve being Rindy’s father, and then Harge, with Sascha. And Rindy, she, she calls me Mama now.”

The words came rushed. Carol squeezed Therese’s hand again, slowly rubbing her thumb over the top of it. “It’s not odd,” she said, keeping her own voice calm and measured. “Are you still okay with what Rindy calls you?”

Eyes widening, Therese turned to face Carol more directly. “Of course. Of course, Carol, I love it.”

Carol couldn’t help the smile that quirked her lips. She’d been almost sure, but had to check, be positive. “Me too,” Carol said. “So, that’s alright then. Tell me more about your father?”

“I’ve just,” said Therese, still struggling with her words. “I’ve thought more about, about being a parent, lately. More than I ever did before. So I’ve been thinking of him more.”

“Have you?” Carol asked, because Therese seemed to need the prodding.

“Yes. I realized I haven’t gone to see him since the funeral. And I thought maybe, since it’s going to be Father’s Day and we’ll have the time…” She trailed off, gave a sort of half-shrug. “I don’t want him to think I’ve forgotten, that I don’t care.” She shook her head. “I know how that sounds—”

Carol hugged Therese. Pulled her in close before she could get to the self-deprecation that would surely follow. “It sounds like you,” Carol said, her voice fierce with the intensity of how much she loved this woman. She wasn’t sure she believed in an afterlife, wasn’t sure Therese did either, but it was a moot point. “It sounds like you,” Carol repeated, pressing a lingering kiss to the side of Therese’s head, “and I adore you.”

Herself, not so much, not in that moment. Yes, Therese hadn’t said anything, but Therese still didn’t, sometimes. More often than not, she had no trouble voicing her wants, her needs, not anymore. But every so often Carol caught glimpses of the sad, quiet little orphan girl who’d learned to live in her own head, keep her desires to herself so they wouldn’t be ignored or mocked.

Both of Carol’s parents had passed long before Therese entered her life. She’d never thought for a moment to view Father’s Day as anything other than a vacation excuse. Never thought that Therese might view it any differently.

Therese returned the hug, tightly, then turned to look at Carol. “You’re not upset?”

“Therese…” The question itself was upsetting, but Carol knew why Therese had to ask it. “No, Therese. No. I’d love to visit your father.” Carol realized too late the mistake. She’d assumed again, about something important. God, but she was screwing all of this up. “If you’d like. If you’d rather be alone, I—”

Therese kissed her silent. A slow, lingering thing, with Therese’s hands reaching up to frame Carol’s face, and Carol holding onto Therese’s waist to keep her steady. So she told herself, but it was probably a mutual thing, judging by how dazed Carol was after the kiss broke.

“I want to be with you,” Therese stated, one hand slipping to the back of Carol’s neck as she looked into her eyes. “If it’s okay.”

“It’s more than okay.”

“You’re sure you don’t mind about the trip? I know you love going away.”

Carol touched kiss-swollen lips. “Being with you. I love being with you. Wherever that is.”

Therese’s answering smile was full and bright, dimples and all, and Carol felt warmer, lighter than she ever would while sitting in the sun next to Peggy, sipping mimosas.

* * *

No matter how many times she did it, Peggy was never fully prepared to step into the Martinelli house. It was a bit like entering the controlled chaos of a triage medical tent, but without the blood.

Usually.

The air nearly always smelled of food, today doubly so. Angie skipped the usual church gathering in favor of helping get the kids ready for today. It was a rare Sunday that she’d be this late in seeing her family, and it showed.

“There’s my babies!” she greeted Pietro and Patrizia, siblings who were much closer to Lizzie’s age than Angie’s. “My other babies,” she added as Lizzie rolled her eyes while the younger Martinelli twins soaked up hugs and kisses from their sister.

Peggy was helped out of her coat by Georgie, who managed to peck her cheek despite being significantly shorter than she was. Steve, who’d once been painfully polite, terrified of setting even a tow out of bounds in this house, greeted Georgie, accepted his own kiss on the cheek from Angel, then hollered up the stairs for Rosario, Francesco and Benny to come down, help him.

Bringing food to a Martinelli gathering after being warned not to was a mortal sin. Therese and her casserole had learned this the hard way once, and the mistake had yet to be repeated. Forbidden from providing more substantial sustenance, Steve insisted on bringing the drinks, both alcoholic and non. Sofia Martinelli undoubtedly ruled her kitchen, but it was a rare circumstance that would have Angelo Sr. turn down free beer.

Steve, who’d been known to move tanks with his bare hands when the occasion called for it, did not need assistance toting in cases of beer and soda. However, ‘Cesco, Rosario and Benny had all been noticeably reticent around them, around Lizzie, since the snow incident. Four months on and they still felt guilty about what happened to Lizzie and Rindy on their watch. They were, so far as Peggy knew, the only ones still holding a grudge. Which was to be expected, but not tolerated.

Their descent from the second floor was too quiet, too careful. Typically, they sounded like a herd of stampeding elephants. Steve hugged all of them in turn. Angie broke away from the twins so she could do the same, kissing their cheeks and earning mumbles of protest in return.

More greetings followed, Peggy sure to add hers in, before the three boys trooped out behind Steve. Entering the Martinelli house almost always required a whole mess of hellos. Peggy was still going through the ritual, enquiring after her numerous remaining brothers-in-law when Patrizia tugged on her dress, getting her attention.

“Can I please hold the baby, sorella?”

The child could be Shirley Temple levels of cute when she wanted, and she clearly wanted now. Patrizia loved Jake, taking every chance she had to give kisses and tell him how cute he was. Much, much cuter than any of her dolls, she was sure to say.

Reflexively, Peggy glanced at Lizzie. Lizzie, who had every opportunity in the world to cuddle with Jake, show affection. Lizzie, who met Peggy’s eyes, rolled her own again, then dashed into the living room, where Marco and Vittore were arm-wrestling.

Tamping down on her reluctance to leave her precious baby boy in the hands of a child barely older than Rindy, Peggy smiled, led Patrizia to a chair in the living room, away from the sofa and coffee table where the tests of strength were taking place. Carefully, she adjusted Patrizia’s hands on Jacob, kneeling down when her sister-in-law and her baby were settled.

“If he cries, just call out for me, alright? Or Steve.”

“Assolutamente no,” said a voice that was very much not that of a nine-year-old. “You call me, ‘Tritzi. Since your sorella didn’t see fit to bring me my grandbaby.”

Ah, the familiar dose of Italian-Catholic guilt. It was good to be home. Checking once more that Patrizia and Jake were okay, Peggy went toward the voice. The kitchen was a paradise of amazing smells, to which Angie had already found her way. She snuck her finger into a pot of what was probably marinera sauce, got her hand smacked for the trouble.

“Signore aiutame. Knock it off,” chided Sofia Martinelli. “I swear, you’re worse than the boys.”

“Oh, so what else is new?” Angie rolled her eyes, much like her daughter had minutes earlier. “Peggy, my mother’s abusing me here. Be a good superhero and defend me.”

“Not a superhero, nor is it my fault that you never learn. Hello, Sofia.”

“Ciao, tesoro.” Sofia pulled Peggy in for a hug, managing it without transferring any of the considerable mess from her apron onto Peggy. “So happy you’re here, and that you put up with this one.” Sofia flicked Angie’s ear, leaving a trace of flour, sugar, or possibly baking soda behind.

“Ow! Mama!” Angie shook her head, retreating with a scowl to the other side of the kitchen. “Nice to know where your loyalties lie, darling.”

Angie was mocking her with the last word, using it in a way that was meant to be her but certainly wasn’t. “I could’ve stayed home,” Peggy stated, following Angie and keeping her voice low enough to be drowned out by the burble of pans on the stove, the general chaos of the house. “I came here under duress, what do you expect?”

“With that attitude? Definitely don’t believe that you never cracked and gave the Germans anything. Don’t expect me to believe that anymore.”

“I was motivated to withstand Nazi torture, _darling_ ,” Peggy replied, making a point of the word. “I’m not particularly motivated to help you right now.”

Not when this day was destined to become its own form of torture.

Before Angie could form a rebuke, which she most certainly would have, another figure joined them in the cramped kitchen. A big bear of a man for whom Angie immediately abandoned her grousing. She hugged her father hard, said something in Italian that Peggy couldn’t catch, muffled as it was in Angelo Sr.’s chest.

“Love you, Papa,” Angie said as she pulled back.

He grinned, touched her cheek. “Love you too, preziosa.”

Peggy steeled herself, knowing the last moments of respite were over.

She was right. Angelo’s eyes found hers the moment he was done with Angie. They were already brighter than usual, worryingly so. Still, Peggy soldiered on.

“Hello, Angelo,” she said, the same way she had for most of a decade. “Happy Father’s Day.”

Angelo gave the barest shake of his head. “Afternoon, Agent Carter.”

She hadn’t been that in a long time. “Good afternoon, Technician Martinelli,” she said, slipping easily if not comfortably into another persona.

Angelo grinned, his already imposing frame standing that much taller as he straightened his posture. He gave her an enthusiastic and perfect salute, nearly lifting her off her feet with the strength of the hug that followed.

Peggy hugged him back, felt small tremors she was sure the others couldn’t see, heard the small hitches in his breathing. “It’s good to see you stateside, Technician,” she murmured, because it was his day and Angie loved him and so did she. “Welcome home.”

* * *

Therese woke to an empty bed. Still half-asleep and curious, she wandered down the hall, into the living room. There was Carol, obviously just returned, purse in one hand, bouquet of flowers in the other.

“Damn,” she said on seeing Therese. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

Had she? Maybe with her absence. Therese woke to it sometimes, when Carol wasn’t where Therese expected, wanted. “No,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “What are those?”

Carol suddenly looked a little nervous about the bundle of color in her hand. She slid her handbag down her other arm, took her time setting it aside. “I made a bit of an assumption. I’m sorry.”

Therese had absolutely no idea what Carol was talking about. “Why?”

“They’re,” she lifted the flowers, set them on the counter. “they’re for your father. I thought,” she fidgeted with her hair, a nervous habit. “Well. It’s a bit of a drive, isn’t it? I thought you might be anxious enough without going into some shop, answering insipid questions about the occasion. As it is, the nosy girl behind the counter thinks my sister’s gone and had another baby. God forbid. I probably should’ve taken you with me, or asked first. But you looked so peaceful, and I know you didn’t sleep well last night—”

Carol no doubt would’ve kept rambling if Therese hadn’t crossed the room, flung tight arms around her waist.

“Oh,” Carol said, just that, then reciprocated the embrace.

“Thank you,” Therese breathed into Carol’s neck, pressed her lips there. “Thank you.”

Carol let go a long breath, relaxed in Therese’s arms. “You’re welcome. But it’s nothing Therese, not really.”

Therese pulled away enough to look at Carol, hold her gaze. She brushed back the bit of hair that Carol just displaced. “Yes, it is. All of it. Okay?”

Carol’s smile was small and soft. She turned her face so she could nuzzle it against Therese’s palm. Then she took that hand in hers, kissed it. “Okay. I’m going to make breakfast.”

“Let me—”

“I’m going to make breakfast,” Carol repeated. She was already in the kitchen, dismissing Therese’s offer with the wave of a hand. “You can put some fresh coffee on, if you like.”

“Can I? You’ll let me do that?” Therese shook her head, trailing Carol.

Carol ended up making a delicious breakfast. Therese, to her shame, didn’t eat much of it. Carol was extra careful with her last night, extra loving. She’d been that the entire week, actually, starting the night Therese requested this. Therese couldn’t remember where her father was buried. It’d been too many years, with Therese too young when it happened. Carol offered to find the information for her, but Therese declined. It was her father, she would visit the place regardless, there was no harm in her finding it for herself.

She was fine getting the information, stealing away on her lunch hour to do it. A cemetery in New Jersey, but not the New Jersey where Carol used to live, where Peggy, Angie and Steve lived now. She felt fine getting the details on her own, accomplished even. Something she told Carol at home that night. She was fine then, and for the rest of the week, and yesterday, when they found themselves taking a midday nap together and Carol held her so close.

All of it, despite Carol’s watchfulness, her worry, was fine. Until Therese sat down to breakfast and her stomach rebelled, fluttering unpleasantly. She’d managed only a slice of toast and a few bites of eggs by the time Carol finished. The apartment, Therese decided while shifting her food around her plate, was too quiet. Rindy was meant to be there, helping in the kitchen by making everything messier, making it take longer. Swinging pajama-clad legs against her chair and chattering away about what she wanted to do before Harge came to get her.

Therese was so lost in these thoughts that she startled when Carol pressed a kiss to the side of her head, dropping her fork with a clatter. She hadn’t heard or seen Carol leave the table, much less come to her.

“Sorry,” said Carol, pulling away with a frown. “I was just getting your plate.”

Therese wanted to say she wasn’t done, that she could finish what Carol made for her. Instead, she squeezed Carol’s hand in thanks. “Sorry. Went away for a minute.”

“I noticed,” said Carol, wry affection in the words. “What are you thinking?”

“About Rindy.”

Carol looked surprised. “Really?”

“It’s not the same without her using half a bottle of syrup on one pancake.”

Carol chuckled. “I suppose it’s not.”

“What do you think she’s doing at Harge’s?”

Carol took the breakfast things away. “Probably eating most of whatever breakfast she and Ava made for Harge. Unless Lilah can cook and didn’t have to call in the help on a Sunday.”

“Rindy says she’s a good cook,” Therese said, took a sip of her coffee after.

“Did she? I must’ve missed that.”

Therese was half-sure Carol was picking at Lilah in this minor way to amuse her, settle her. “No brunch with the grandparents?”

“No, thank God,” Carol replied in that particular tone she only used when talking about Harge’s family. “As I understand it, they’re still in timeout for calling the new bride a Nazi.”

“How long do you think that will last?”

“It’s already gone longer than I thought it would. However long Harge holds out isn’t long enough as far as I’m concerned. No, I’m sure he’ll spend the day doting over the kids, trying for perfect photos of baby’s first Father’s Day. If he’s anything like Rindy, Sascha will spit up all over him while that happens. We can hope, at least.”

“You’re awful,” Therese said with a smile, cradling her coffee cup in both hands as she brought it to her lips.

Carol half-turned away from the sink where she’d dumped the dishes. “I know,” she said with a wink. “And you’re wonderful.”

Therese wanted to tell Carol it was okay, that she didn’t have to do all this because everything was fine. Normal.

“I love you,” she said instead.

They departed not long after breakfast. Carol was already dressed and showered, which left Therese rushing to catch up and, idiotically, fussing over what to wear. She caught herself eventually, chided herself as she finally grabbed a pair of slacks, a top that wouldn’t have her sweating in the June heat.

The drive was long and mostly silent between them. Carol put the radio on low and didn’t ask Therese for anything more than the occasional direction. She reached for Therese’s hand sometimes as they drove, gave it a squeeze. Therese was quick to return the gesture.

The cemetery was small. Much smaller than Therese remembered. In her memory, there were endless stones, rows upon rows that went on forever. She remembered asking her mother if each one of those was a dead person, remembered how uncaring her mother seemed when she said yes.

It was much smaller than Therese would’ve thought, but it still took them awhile to find him. They searched the markers together, Carol holding the flowers she brought. Therese saw his name first. On a tiny, aged stone. His name, the year of his birth, of his death. Nothing about being a beloved husband (which he hadn’t been) or father (which he had), not even the full dates. As if it didn’t really matter when exactly he’d entered this world, or left it.

It mattered to Therese. It mattered because she couldn’t remember his birthday. She remembered the day he died, the events surrounding it, but not the date. Now, unless she spent more lunch hours digging through obituaries, she’d probably never find out. The state of this marker, she doubted her mother would’ve paid for one anyway.

He was buried as Jason, which made sense. That was his legal name, his American name. In her head though, at least on bad days, he was Jachym. His given name, the one that was too foreign to be kept. She didn’t recall him ever using it in public. Had she ever heard him say it at all? Or was that just her mother, when they would fight and she’d hiss out his name like a curse?

Her mother had despised Jachym, only tolerated Jason. And even Jason was only given this, this rock where she couldn’t even lie and say she’d loved him, or tell the truth about Therese adoring him.

He deserved better.

“It’s just stone,” Carol said quietly. “It doesn’t mean anything about who he was, or how much he mattered.”

Therese had a brief, unpleasant moment of wanting to snap at Carol. Carol would say that. Her family, Harge’s family, they would all have elaborate, ornate stones, would balk at the idea of something so simple. Except Therese couldn’t snap at Carol because Carol was right, of course she was, and Carol didn’t deserve the childish cruelty that Therese’s mother wasn’t here to receive.

“All right?” Carol asked, brushing her arm over Therese’s.

They were alone in the cemetery, confirmed it during the search. At Carol’s gesture, small as it was, Therese checked anyway. She hated that she cared, even now. She hated that she had to care.

“I can wait by the car,” Carol said, “if you want to—”

“No,” Therese insisted, the uncertainty in Carol’s voice flooding her with guilt. She was too deep in her own head, and she’d acted as if she didn’t want Carol here, and that wasn’t true at all. She slipped her fingers into Carol’s, squeezed harder than Carol had in the car. Probably too hard, but Therese needed her to understand. “Don’t go. Please.”

Carol visibly relaxed. “No,” she said, a promise. With her free hand, she held out the bouquet.

Therese took it, took her time letting go of Carol’s hand. When she let herself do that, rid herself of the foolish idea that Carol would disappear the moment they broke contact, Therese bent, carefully placing the flowers on a stone that’d likely stayed bare for over a decade.

She was here now, looking at what remained of her father, and somehow, she hadn’t thought this far ahead. Hadn’t even realized how badly she needed to see him until she suddenly did, sometime a few weeks ago while Rindy talked about Harge and Carol reminded her of the upcoming holiday. Therese couldn’t remember a word of the details, but it had hit her then, out of nowhere, how little she spoke of her father, even to Carol. It built up from there, or spiraled, maybe. All the paternity drama of the last year or so. How Rindy had, so sleepily and naturally, called her Mama on a chilly night six months ago, and how Therese felt when she’d registered the words. Like she could fly. Like a thousand-pound weight had just slammed down on her shoulders.

How her father must have felt that too, the elation, the responsibility.

She’d needed to see him, as much as that was possible. Now she had, she was, and she was lost.

What was she supposed to do or say after this long? Was there even a point in it?

Carol touched her back, a wordless gesture of, what? Comfort? Encouragement?

It was whatever Therese needed it to be, she realized. It was always whatever Therese needed it to be.

Her knees, which were previously both shaky and stiff, steadied. Feeling more like herself than she had since she woke up, Therese sat down in the grass, not caring what it would do to her clothes.

“Hi, Dad,” she said in a voice she couldn’t quite make into her own. She cleared her throat, felt Carol behind her. “Happy Father’s Day.”

It was strange, speaking to him. She told herself it wasn’t all the different than saying Steve’s name when he was far away, or underwater, saying it at a normal volume and trusting he’d hear it.

“I’m sorry,” she said, recognizing herself a little more. “I’m sorry I haven’t been here.”

She wanted, irrational as it was, to make excuses. Tell him how her mother never took her back here. Tell him about the school. Tell him how she hadn’t known where he was. They were too flimsy for her to voice, even to a weathered piece of stone. She could’ve found him when she graduated. Probably, before she left for California, Sister Alicia would’ve taken Therese to him, if she asked.

“It hurt,” she said, because she couldn’t lie. “I hurt, without you. And I kept…I hurt for a long time, I was afraid to make it worse, so I stayed away. I wasn’t strong.”

Carol didn’t speak, but her hand landed on Therese’s shoulder, squeezed. Therese couldn’t look back at her. She’d see the argument in Carol’s eyes, the assertion that Therese wasn’t weak, not at all. She couldn’t see that now, not yet.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” she repeated. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you, when you left.”

He’d died. In pain, in some soulless hospital room, and Therese hadn’t been there to say goodbye. Could she have? Could she have done that when here she was, unable to voice the fact he was dead, even staring at his headstone? She didn’t know.

She still resented her mother, and everyone else in that hospital who never let her find out.

“I’m here now,” Therese said. “I’m here, and I’m happy, Dad. I wasn’t, for a long time. Sometimes I didn’t realize it, but I do now, and I’m happy now. I have someone I love, so, so much, and we’re happy.”

Part of her, the bitter, resentful part, wanted to say how she was happier than he’d ever been with Mom. Loved better than he’d ever been with her.

But her mother didn’t have a place here, didn’t deserve to be part of this.

“We’re happy, and we have a daughter. I…I have a daughter.”

Had she said that? Ever? It was true, but had she ever voiced it in such plain terms, to anyone? If she had, Therese couldn’t think when.

“She’s so wonderful, Dad.” Therese smiled. “Kind and loving and smart.” Her throat tightened. “So smart. We, we look at the stars sometimes, like you and I did. I taught her some constellations and she’s so good at finding them, remembering.”

Therese didn’t remember. Not enough. She felt the gaps in her memory, knew that she used to know more, that he’d taught her more, and she’d lost them. But Rindy didn’t know that. That didn’t matter to Rindy when the two of them were cuddled together on a lounger on the balcony, usually with Carol watching from another chair. Rindy didn’t see her failures, only the stars Therese pointed to.

“She’s wonderful,” said Therese, “and a great big sister. I wish you could’ve known her, known Carol. I wish you could’ve seen more. But we’re…we’re happy. All of us.”

Therese talked a little while longer. About her job, her friends. How she’d once, not all that long after Jason’s death, hid herself away to keep from having to take a picture with Captain America. How she took his picture all the time now, and sometimes got paid for it, and that was ridiculous because he and his family were part of the reason her life was better now.

She hadn’t realized it when she thought about finding him, possibly not until she was standing right here, but she’d come to tell him she was happy. That was the only thing that truly needed saying.

She touched the letters of his name, etched in stone. She couldn’t say goodbye to him. If she hadn’t then, why should she now? She stood and her legs were unreliable again, and Carol helped her. She hadn’t looked at Carol for long minutes. Carol was blurred in her vision. Carol produced a handkerchief, gave it to Therese, only to wipe away the worst of the tears herself.

“Can we go home?” Therese asked quietly.”

“Of course.”

Therese gave her a watery smile, bent one more time to make sure Carol’s flowers sat just so by the marker. “I won’t stay away so long anymore,” she told her father, because she couldn’t say goodbye.

She thought they would leave after that, but Carol stepped forward, bending her taller frame to press the tips of her fingers against the stone. She did that just as gently as she’d wiped Therese’s tears away.

“Thank you.” Carol said, quiet but clear.

They made it to the car before Therese finished with Carol’s handkerchief, before she thought to ask. Carol opened her door and Therese climbed in. “What did you mean?”

“Hmmm?”

“What were you thanking him for?”

Carol looked perplexed, and for a moment. Then the puzzled expression cleared, turned to something like amusement, but much more tender than that.

“You,” Carol said.

Therese frowned. “What?”

“I was thanking him for you, Carol said, like it was a sweet, but ultimately silly question. Then she shut Therese’s door and crossed in front of the car to join her for the drive home.

* * *

Angie got her storytelling from her father.

Peggy realized, intellectually, that there was a point at which she hadn’t known that. A point in time when this very obvious fact remained unknown to her. It was so long ago now though that it was difficult to accept.

The hand gestures were there (she’d never met a Martinelli who didn’t talk as much with their hands as their mouth), the dramatic pauses, the facial expressions of one who is enraptured by their own tale. Honestly, Peggy couldn’t understand how Angelo Sr. hadn’t supported his daughter’s acting career, recognized the part he played.

Peggy loved Angie’s stories. When she was exhausted, beaten down physically, emotionally, or both. When she wasn’t able to pay attention like she should. She loved Angie’s voice, her passion for the things she recounted, good or bad.

Angelo’s stories were a different matter, at least the one he’d chosen tonight.

They were gathered around the dining table, which by all rights should’ve collapsed under the weight of the food it held. It never did though, and Steve, the bastard, never listened when Peggy suggested he help it along, use that science-given strength of his to lift it just a little in the wrong direction.

Every year then, at least once, but usually two or three times, Peggy was subjected to this. So too were Angelo’s children who, because of the holiday, were forbidden from voicing their disgust aloud, but did mouth along to certain parts, shooting knowing looks between themselves. Peggy was unclear on whether or not they thought their father didn’t notice.

“I was so tired,” he said, anything but tired now as he gestured with a forkful of pasta. “Nessuna speranza. Beaten. Starved. Broken. I hope none of my children ever have to feel that. But if you do, God forbid, I hope you have an angel, like I had, to pull you from that darkness.”

“Is that what she did, Papa?” Angie asked. “Because I’ve been asking her to change the lightbulb in the hallway for three weeks. Nothing. You, she yanks out of a pitch black—”

“Angela!” Sofia scolded. “Sta’zitto!”

“You know you never would’ve seen her again if not for me, right?” Angie asked, nibbling on a sizable piece of garlic bread.

“She means if she wasn’t queer as a three-dollar bill,” said Angel.

“Oh, like you can talk,” Angie retorted.

“Bambini demoni!” Sofia barked. “Hush.”

“Sorry, Mama,” Angie replied. Her twin’s only response was to steal a sip from Georgie’s drink.

Angie squeezed Peggy’s thigh under the table. Peggy smiled as much as she could. Angie knew better than to interrupt this ritual. So did her brother. They did it every time. At least every time the story was told within Peggy’s earshot.

“This angel, this blessing,” Angelo went on as though he’d never stopped, “gave me everything I needed after so long with nothing. She told me about my boy, my brave, honorable, stupid boy, the pilot. Flying missions, helping our boys.”

Yes, Angel understood. He made light of it more often than not, but he understood in a way Angie simply couldn’t, because Angie hadn’t been there. Thank God, Angie hadn’t been there.

“And my other blessing,” Angelo said. “The most precious gift I could’ve gotten. You know what that was?”

Rosario sunk down low in his seat, stifling his groan behind a huge bite of food.

“My ‘Sario. Il mio prezioso bambino.”

“Aww, little baby ‘Sario, so precious and perfect. What the hell happened, ‘Sario? You started off so well.”

“Angel,” Sofia warned, somehow managing to make a butter knife threatening as she waved it at him.

Peggy looked across the table at Angel, tried to tell him it was okay. He was pushing too hard, risking life and limb. At least risking an unpleasant meeting with a wooden spoon.

“My ‘Sario,” Angelo continued, forever unperturbed. “She,” he used his chin to point at Peggy, “was first to show me my boy. I couldn’t keep my words straight, but she was patient, kind.”

On Peggy’s other side, Steve half-stood, reaching one-handed across the table for his fourth slab of lasagna. He fumbled the tray a bit, moving it safely, but causing a clatter in the process. “Sorry,” he said to the table as a whole.

Peggy touched his knee under cover of Sofia’s best table cloth, survivor of two world wars and nine children. He didn’t fumble unless he wanted to, not if he was moving anything lighter than a tank.

She was a realist. Nothing would deter Angelo, it never did. The Russians could bomb them this minute and he would keep right on with his story. But it was nice of the others to try, to give her precious seconds.

“She showed me my family, and then she brought me back to them,” said Angelo, proving Peggy right. He raised his glass, clearly expecting to be followed. “Agent Carter.”

“Oh nonsense. It’s your day,” Peggy said, because it was part of the bloody script at this point.

“Si. And I wouldn’t have this day or any others without you.”

“And Steve,” said Angie.

Steve shrugged. “I just punched some Nazis. Really not that impressive when I do it. Unfair advantage.”

“Is it really unfair when it’s Nazis?” Georgie asked, swatting away Angel’s hand on his plate.

“And Steve,” Angelo Sr, agreed. “Saluti.”

“Papa,” said Pietro, his voice a plaintive whine. “I don’t got anything to drink with.” He held up his now empty cup of grape juice as proof, tipping it over to bring home the point.

A few drops that’d remained at the bottom hit the two world wars, nine children tablecloth. Sofia scolded him, got up to handle the unforgivable mess. With the interruption came the hum of long withheld conversation, one of the boys asking if they could please turn the TV back on. Peggy seized the distraction, excusing herself and retreating to the back door off of the kitchen as fast as she could without losing her dignity.

She’d have to slip Pietro her portion of dessert later.

* * *

Therese felt very…untethered. It wasn’t the ideal word, not exact, but she couldn’t find exact.

Carol was as loving and attentive as ever when they returned from the cemetery. On the verge of hovering, still, but Therese wasn’t complaining. She wasn’t hurting either, not in the way Carol seemed to worry about. She was just…adrift. In her own home. With Carol there. Not fully, not enough to have her breaking, panicking. It was more akin to the swimming at the Carter-Martinelli-Rogers home last month. She understood that she was safe, surrounded by people who’d keep her that way. But when she floated too close to the deep end without one of those people in easy reach, when someone dived in and shifted the water unexpectedly, that sense of quiet unease deepened.

She didn’t know what to do, for one thing. Literally. Visiting the grave was such a momentous event, regardless of what she’d told Carol, told herself. What was she meant to do after that, after something she’d first been kept from, then avoided herself, for most of her life?

For lack of a better answer, Therese did nothing. And everything. She straightened up the apartment, but couldn’t commit to anything major like scrubbing the floors, or picking through the drawer of old furniture and photography magazines to purge the ones they’d never look at again. She attempted to sort through photographs, tried separating the family ones from the work ones from the ones she’d taken just because, but the task was too simple to hold her attention and she ended up setting the whole pile aside in frustration, undoing what little progress she’d made by stacking them all together again. She tried doing nothing at all, resting her eyes in hopes of a nap, escape, but couldn’t stand that for more than a few seconds.

She went to their balcony, watered the plants out there, grabbed the ashtray so she could dump it out. Carol, who’d been reading over some paperwork for the shop throughout most of Therese’s attempts to settle on something, had cleared the kitchen table of it by the time Therese came in to empty the ashtray. She’d just finished pouring a drink, set it down in the living room.

“Quite the busy bee today, aren’t you?”

Therese smiled. It didn’t come as easily as she’d like, but it wasn’t false either. “Just getting some things done before the work rush starts again.”

“Sunday’s meant to be the day of rest, isn’t it?”

“That’s a church thing. Since when do you put stock in any of that?” Therese asked, not unkindly.

“What, I can’t dabble, take what I like?”

“Heathen.”

“Guilty. Come sit with me?” Carol asked, resting a hand on the arm of the sofa.

Therese didn’t try to use the ashtray as an excuse. She thought of it, but only briefly. She set the tray on the counter, her task incomplete, left the balcony door cracked open to the June air.

Carol’s smile loosened the knot of indefinable tension gripping Therese. They settled together, adjusting around each other until Carol was half-reclined with her back to the end of the couch and Therese was partway on top of her. In a move so natural now that it almost came without thought, Therese tucked her head under Carol’s chin.

Carol hummed approvingly, held Therese in her arms. “I missed you,” Carol said with nothing but warmth, kissing Therese’s hair.

Therese chuckled. “I’ve been right here.”

“Have you?”

“I’m trying to be.”

She felt Carol nod. “It’s okay if you’re not, you know. Wherever you are now, it’s okay.”

Therese breathed past a tightness that wanted to form in her chest, resting her ear against Carol’s. “I want to be with you.”

Carol’s hold tightened instantly. “You will be. Always. But it’s okay if you’re not here right now. I’ll follow, wherever you need to be.”

Therese knew that. She’d known for almost always, their trip today only proved it. “Paid a lot of attention to my travels, haven’t you, for someone who’s had her nose in numbers all day?”

“I hardly got a thing done,” Carol replied, petting her fingers through Therese’s hair.

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“You have this cute little frown you get when you’re actually concentrating. You never had it today.”

Carol scoffed. “I’m not the only one paying attention, I see. And my frown is not ‘cute.’”

“It is. I can bring you photographic evidence.”

“Don’t you dare.” Carol’s arms tightened again. “Now I’ve finally got you, I’m not letting go.”

Don’t, Therese wanted to say. Don’t ever, please. She let a comfortable silence stretch between them instead.

“I’m alright,” she said finally, after taking a few minutes to put her thoughts in some kind of order. “It hurts, but it’s not exactly a bad hurt?” She made it a question without meaning to, still struggling to explain what she didn’t understand.

Carol nodded like she did understand, one hand still combing through Therese’s hair, the other drawing mindlessly against her arm. “But it still hurts.”

Not a question. “Yes.”

Carol pressed her lips to the side of Therese’s head, lingered there. “Do you understand yet that that’s alright?”

Therese released a long exhale. Carol had said once that Therese held in just as much awfulness as she did sometimes, she was just more sober when she did it. Therese couldn’t remember what prompted the observation, only that neither of them were sober when Carol made it. And that it wasn’t wrong.

The nuns at the school were accommodating at first. They understood why Therese cried, why she hated being there, why she was confused. But there were more children to care for than there were adults to do the caring. Even Sister Alicia couldn’t or wouldn’t come every time Therese had a nightmare, every time she longed for a mother who hadn’t been very good at it in the first place but was still Therese’s, still someone she could claim, who belonged only to her, not a hundred other children.

By the time Therese consciously yearned to make that claim, it wasn’t true. Her mother did not belong to her anymore, or she wouldn’t be in that place with all those other children. That realization brought tears, tears that were either discouraged or ignored depending on the day, on who caught her shedding them.

She’d cried in front of Richard a few times. He didn’t ignore her, mostly, but he didn’t know what to do, and it might’ve been better if he hadn’t tried. His fumbling attempts to comfort her usually made Therese feel worse than whatever it was that set her off in the first place.

She’d cried when Carol threw her out of the house, without doing it in so many words, the night Harge spirited Rindy away in a haze of booze and anger. She’d felt like a child while doing it. It was worse on the way back from Waterloo, knowing Carol was on the verge of losing everything, or had lost it already. Yet Therese was the one who cried, and Carol comforted her, and every second of it was awful.

Therese still, after all these years, felt pangs of the anger, embarrassment, reproach that’d been so overwhelming with Abby. Abby driving her back to a place that held nothing for her, Therese a mess of tears and sickness while Abby watched on, silent.

Therese knew it was okay to hurt around Carol. She understood that. She just didn’t feel it sometimes. She told Carol as much, and knew Carol would never be entirely happy with that answer.

But Carol accepted it. Carol kept holding her.

“It’s…strange,” Therese said after a minute or two of quiet. “My life before you, and my life after you. They’ve been so separate.” Therese had only really kept Dannie, Phil, Louise, a handful of other friends, and her photographs. The rest of it had been, not thrown out, as Carol once advised her to do, but stored away, out of sight.

“Is that how you think of me? Your Before and After?”

“Yes,” Therese said easily.

Carol pressed another long kiss to Therese’s hair. “I feel the same about you, you know.”

Therese knew. She also knew it wasn’t quite the same. Carol had more Befores and Afters than she did. Abby, Harge, Rindy. Therese was jealous of that once. She knew better now, knew to embrace the experiences that made Carol Carol instead of worrying about not having enough of her own yet. Those defining points, those lines in the sand that could never be washed away, they would come, And Carol would be with her for all of them.

“But they don’t need to be separate,” Carol said. Her next words were softer. “I’d like it if they weren’t.”

Therese shifted, bumping her nose against Carol’s neck, the spot where she sprayed her perfume.

“I want to know every part of you,” Carol said, still soft against the noises of the world outside their half-closed door.

It was Therese’s turn to hold Carol tighter. “I don’t mean to hide,” she said into Carol’s skin, needed her to understand that.

“I know,” Carol said. “Shh, I know. I don’t either. But I think we both do, sometimes.”

Therese thought of Carol downplaying her hurt over Rindy, her ache for the child. It wasn’t as common now. Because Harge was being more human with Rindy and Carol’s access to her. Because Therese had given Carol a version of this same talk. More than once.

“We do,” she said. “I do.”

“We do,” Carol corrected. “I wish I’d met your father. I wish I knew for myself what you see when you think of him. What helped make you so good.”

“Not that good.”

“Amazing then.”

Therese scoffed.

“Stop that, I’m serious. I wish I could see you with him. See him seeing you. Being as proud of you as I am.”

Therese didn’t know why it hit her like it did then. She’d said much the same thing herself, at the gravesite. Hearing it from Carol though, confirmation that Carol too wished for things that could never be, it broke something in Therese, some last sliver of resistance she’d maintained up to now. Carol’s perfume hit her nose differently as her breathing became rougher, gulps of air she had to fight for past the tears.

“Oh, baby.”

She felt Carol’s words against her cheek, the vibrations of them against the wetness. She gripped Carol tighter, clutching one of Carol’s favorite blouses too tight in her fingers.

“Therese.”

Carol’s hands moved, everywhere. Down along her back, her arms, against her face, as much as they could from that angle. Carol shifted, shifted Therese with her, and it brought out a broken, needy sound Therese hated hearing from herself.

“Shh, easy, easy baby. It’s okay, I promise. I promise it’s going to be okay.”

Therese’s instinctive fear that Carol would leave proved groundless. All Carol had done was to move Therese a bit further down her body, so her head was nearer to Carol’s chest than her throat. A bit more maneuvering, and Carol could kiss her that way, nuzzle her features. They were small kisses, without pattern and hardly there, but everywhere. Therese could feel her face going hot and red, knew she must taste of salt. Carol’s lips were cool on her skin as Therese shook in her arms.

“Shh,” Carol repeated. “Good girl. Let it go. Let it go now.”

Carol’s voice was low and tender and crooning, a tone Therese associated more with Rindy than herself, used when the girl was especially upset. A small part of Therese hated how that same cadence had to be used on her, but not enough to want Carol to stop talking.

“It’s okay,” Carol said again. “I love you, Therese. It’s okay.”

Therese tried to say how she loved Carol back, loved Carol, needed her, needed her not to stop, not to stop any of it, but the words caught in her throat, came out a choked, warbling mess.

“I’m here,” Carol said. “I’m right here. I’m here, and you are safe, alright?”

Therese couldn’t answer, knew Carol didn’t expect her to. She nodded jerkily against Carol’s chest, realized that, whether she’d meant to do it or not, Carol hadn’t broken anything within her. Carol hadn’t destroyed anything with those soft words that opened the floodgates. She’d only released something, allowed it to finally run its course through Therese’s whole body, her soul.

That small, stubborn part of Therese’s brain was still there. It hated the sounds she made when she cried, hated her for making them.

Therese muffled that part, that voice in her head, with Carol’s voice instead, Carol’s endless stream of comfort and love and safety.

When she’d eventually cried herself out enough to doze, it was with Carol’s soft words in one ear and Carol’s strong, steady heartbeat in the other.

* * *

Being outside provided a small measure of relief. Standing on the back porch, Peggy found the extra cigarettes she made sure to carry with her on these days, chose one.

A lighter. She didn’t have a goddamn lighter.

Peggy swore soundlessly, at everything and nothing, made herself breathe, made herself be where she was. She focused on the tree in the backyard, the battered picnic table, a bike belonging to one of the children.

There was a tent out there too, a small, patched thing that might be as old as the storied good tablecloth. Sometimes during the hot weather, a child or two would sleep out here, or on the enclosed front porch.

Peggy looked at the tent, blinked back an inconvenient sting at the back of her eyes, made herself stay where she was supposed to.

She did this several minutes, probably, but she was also a bit foggy on time right now. It tended to blur on these days, play dirty tricks.

Like she had, before.

However long she was out there, her solitude was interrupted by a creaking floorboard, a heavy step. She knew it without looking, knew Angie’s father before he held out the glass of port she’d abandoned in her haste.

“There’s my favorite daughter-in-law,” he said, his tone much different from the one he’d used inside.

“Not a hard title to claim when I’m your only daughter-in-law.”

“Still my favorite.”

He handed her a lighter and she took it, set the glass on the porch railing so she could make use of it. The first drag of nicotine to her lungs was a relief, and if Angelo noticed the slight tremble in her wrist, he didn’t say.

“Thank you,” Peggy told him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his big arms laid out across the rail beside her.

Peggy instantly felt worse. “No. Don’t. Don’t ever.”

“I do. I know better. It’s, it’s hard, days like this. Seeing everything I wouldn’t have if not for you.”

“And Steve,” Peggy replied before taking a drink.

“And Steve. Si. Steve gets recognized for all his great deeds. Everyone knows what Steve’s done.”

It was an explanation, an apology. “He doesn’t need the recognition.”

“Or want it?”

“It has it’s perks. He never has to pay for a meal, if he doesn’t want to.”

He always wanted to.

“I’m sorry,” Angelo said. “I know better. Sofia tells me. Junior tells me.”

Peggy hadn’t known that, that Sofia realized, or that Angel spoke to his father about it. Perhaps that was why Sofia was always so insistent on stuffing Peggy full of cannoli later, more insistent than usual. Perhaps it was her own apology. If it was, Peggy had all the more reason to feel guilty.

“Don’t be sorry,” Peggy repeated. “You tell that story so well; I almost believe it.” Almost, but not quite. “That I was a real knight in shining armor.”

She’d wanted just that as a child, so very much. Knights were good and kind and they vanquished the bad and helped the good.

“You were my knight in shining armor.”

“I was a tired agent in dirty fatigues who’d spoken to over fifty men in two days.”

"A gorgeous tired agent who gave me a chance I never thought I'd have. Il mio angelo custode, my own Saint Gabriel.” He paused, gave them a few seconds of silence save for the ever-present rumble of a pack of Martinellis cooped up nearby. “Besides, my fatigues were much, much dirtier than yours.”

Peggy laughed at the wrong time, choking on her cigarette smoke like a teenager. “That’s a low bar to hop over, but I suppose you’re right.” She coughed again, cleared her lungs. “I signed papers.”

“You gave me my life back.”

Angelo shook out his own cigarette from a pack in his pocket. Peggy handed him the lighter.

The sting in her eyes was that much worse after the coughing fit. They stayed there together, looking out upon the small, well-kept yard Angelo fought so hard to get. Peggy blinked away the blurriness, her eyes once again finding the tent.

* * *

_She’d first met him in a tent, on day two._

_Day one was for the able-bodied, the men with the fewest injuries. Get them patched up, get what they know, get them back to fighting as soon as possible, never mind the time spent as guests of a mad scientist Nazi._

_The second day was men with injuries. Those who'd have to heal in some way before they were rotated back into hell. Some were mentally broken, some physically, many both. Martinelli wasn't the worst case she saw on day two, but he was far from the best._

_He was one of the older men. Big and broad in his photo, healthy. When he walked into her tent, Peggy doubted he weighed much more than she did. He was gaunt, his cheeks sunken in. There was a beard where there hadn’t been. His hair was wild and dirty, much too long for regulations. His belt, a loaner, had fresh holes poked into it to keep his pants up. Even then it was a near thing._

_He looked hollowed out, to Peggy’s eye. The crutch didn’t help. It was old and ill-fitting, not especially heavy, but Peggy heard the ragged breathing as he struggled with it. She invited him to sit at the cheap, bare table (it was meant to sound like an invitation), didn’t offer help as he hobbled toward her. If he’d tried to find a dignified way to sit down with the crutch, it didn’t show._

_“Technician Angelo Martinelli Sr.?” she said, a question that didn’t exist. “I’m Agent Peggy Carter, SSR. It’s good to have you home.”_

_She was using the soft voice, the kind voice, the one expected of women like her. She still saw him flinch as she moved toward him, flinch again at the barely-there noise of his file folder hitting the table._

_“Ma’am.”_

_His voice was small and scratchy, softer than hers, though she doubted that was intentional._

_Peggy said what she always did at the start. Repeated her happiness for his survival, thanked him for what he’d done._

_“I hear you were splitting your rations with the other men. They say you helped keep them alive in there.”_

_Martinelli seemed ill-prepared to speak again. “We looked out for each other, ma’am,” he said after too long a pause, each word visibly costing him._

_“It shows, in your case.” She gave him a small, calculated smile, but his face didn’t change, the muscles there seemingly as weak as every other part of him._

_Peggy gave him soup. A cup of the most vile chicken soup in existence, she could confidently say, but it was better than what he’d had, better than most of the men got, even when they weren’t captured by the enemy. An MRE was the typical fare, but her status gave her access to the terrible soup, if she took time enough to get it. She usually didn’t. Steve’s USO group got what passed for real food too, though she doubted very much that it did anything to sustain Steve. He was rewarded with food after his trek back to camp, but she’d seen him hand it over to some of the 107 th’s men. She guessed the miracle formula coursing through his veins kept him going well enough. She also had no doubt whatsoever that he was hungry._

_She let Martinelli eat, mostly undisturbed. There wasn’t much there to start with, and he ate with the speed of a starving man. She waited until he was down to a few bites before engaging him again._

_She told him the debrief was an important step. Debrief always sounded better than interrogation. She told him they would mostly be confirming what was already known, but that clarity was key._

_She told almost everyone these things, including the ones who weren’t trained in communications, the ones weren’t likely to know much of importance._

_She confirmed the basic of the basics first, made his name a question again “just for the record.”_

_“Technician Fifth Grade Angelo Felice Martinelli Sr., he said in that voice that was much too small and weak for the man in his file, but perfect for the one sitting in front of her. He got three numbers in before stopping himself, looking to her for confirmation. She told him that would do fine, thanked him._

_Name, rank, serial number. All they were authorized to give. How many times had the man rattled those things off to his captors?_

_She moved on to other details, other confirmations. His wife, his children, his job as a lineman, keeping New York’s phone connections running smoothly. “You’ll be returning to Patterson, New Jersey, when this is done?”_

_“Si, I—no.” He shook his head, wild hair threatening to cover his eyes. “Paramus now. Bigger house. More family around.”_

_“My mistake.”_

_She asked him more about his family. Most of them were eager to talk of their families, and he was no different._

_“Junior, my oldest boy, he flies,” Martinelli said, pride showing on his ravaged face. “For farms upstate, mostly. Other times, he drives trucks long-haul. Whatever keeps him moving.”_

_“He’s got something against standing still?”_

_“I think he just likes getting away from all the crying, ma’am.”_

_He made a sound at that that could generously be called a chuckle, and Peggy seized the chance to follow suit. “Four children,” she said. “Must be quite the ruckus indeed.”_

_“Si.”_

_She listened about his wife who took care of the babies, who used to bring in extra money sewing for people in the neighborhood. He left the ‘before things changed’ unspoken, and so did she. She pretended to care about his eldest girl, his namesake’s twin, who helped out with her siblings, who used to sit for children in the neighborhood to bring in extra money._

_Again, she let the unspoken parts remain that way._

_It was always harder, after the families. A harsh transition no matter how tactfully Peggy phrased it, how careful she was. The easy things, the things the men wanted to talk about? Almost never the things that mattered._

_She asked him about the last mission, the one she’d hear a hundred different accounts of before she was through. Asked him what they were doing and where, how they were captured. His speech slowed considerably then. No more wheezing chuckles, or twinkles of life behind haunted eyes. He told her things, but not enough, not quickly enough, it was all freezes and stops and starts._

_He’d gone almost mute by the time they were at Schmidt’s facility, at that part in the narrative. She’d prodded him along to just outside of the death factory, but now they were stalled._

_“You hadn’t entered the facility yet?”_

_He shook his head, barely, eyes downcast._

_“Never thought of making a break for it?”_

_Confusion made the lines of his face even deeper. “Que?”_

_“Running, Technician.”_

_“To where?”_

_“Home.”_

_“Run to Paramus?”_

_"Azzano isn't terribly far from Andrazza."_

_She’d given him terrible coffee after the terrible soup, while he talked about his wife. His hands, which had almost become steady during the earlier line of questioning, shook with renewed intensity, fingers spasming against the chipped cup._

_“I am not…I am an American.”_

_Peggy could hear him doing it, trying to Americanize his voice, sound like a plain New Yorker. She was sure he could do it better on a better day, in a better place. “Through Ellis Island,” she said._

_"Ero un bambino."_

_“Old enough to remember."_

_"I am an American."_

_"Now. You and your wife, your children.” She pretended to consult the file. “Isn’t one of your sons called Benito?”_

_“I’m an American,” he repeated, anger raising his voice, bringing new light to his eyes. “I fight for the Americans. This,” he shifted, in visible pain as he touched the crutch left leaning on the table, “for the Americans.”_

_“So tell me about that, Technician. Please.”_

_She’d rattled him, insulted him, enough to get him talking again. He told her about entering the base, answered her when she drew him out on details, as well as he could. He faltered over a young man who’d done what Peggy suggested earlier, made a run for it. The man, really just a boy, got a bullet in the head for his troubles._

_Peggy managed to coax him past that one, but it only got harder. Martinelli was a workhorse, not one of those chosen for the experiments. Not so for some of the others. Some gratefully took half of Martinelli’s rations, only to be dragged off minutes later and never returned._

_She couldn’t get him past that. His mind was somewhere else, with all of those dead boys. So she opened his file again. “Those men? They weren’t your fault, Technician. They did their best, and so did you. That’s all any of us can do. It’s what your son is doing.”_

_Peggy heard bones creak in Martinelli’s neck as his head snapped up. “What?”_

_"Sergeant Pilot Angelo Felice Martinelli Junior. Currently he's at an undisclosed location up north hauling supplies for the Allies."_

_“What? No, no. He, he hauls produce, for vineyards, he—"_

_"He flies planes for the United States Army Airforce, Technician. He's not a fighter, not doing extraordinary acts for the world, but he is transporting much needed supplies, and men back and forth. He's carried the injured a time or two. He's nothing of interest, but he has been noticed, remarked upon." Noticed by her, because she went looking for the information._

_That, that got him talking again. Question after question tumbling from his mouth, a broken mixture of English and Italian. Peggy said she’d answer them. After Martinelli did the same for her._

_He told her what he knew about the wiring he’d done over there. How the lines worked, where the poles were placed for communications. She asked again about who was with him, who did and didn’t return, got better answers this time. She brought him a map, asked him to trace routes, locations. And when he’d done that long enough that his hands shook too badly to be helpful, when he was back to the unintelligible ramblings in two languages. Peggy cheerfully informed him that he’d gotten one of their earliest questions wrong, a simple, baseline answer._

_“No,” he said, head going back and forth while the rest of his body shook like a leaf. “That’s not right. Non sono un bugiardo.”_

_“I don’t think you’re a liar, Technician, not at all. One tends to miss things around here. The post is notoriously unreliable, and when you’re behind enemy lines…”_

_“Agent…ma’am, non capisco.”_

_“Five children, Technician, not four.”_

_"Five? No. No, no. Quattro. Ho quattro bambini."_

_"Technician--"_

_"Angela, Angelo, Marco, my Ben--Benny. My baby Benny."_

_Peggy, not missing how he caught himself on the last name, felt the sting of using it against him. She pushed it down. Like so many other things, it would wait ‘til later. Had to. “And Rosario,” she said, giving him the name he’d missed._

_"No...Ro... Rosario? Lei Ha detto che avrebbe detto il rosario per me ogni giorno. Mi lei ha dato un rosario, una vera preghiera. Oh mio Dio."_

_"I don't speak Italian that well, Technician."_

_"Mi dispiace...sorry. Sorry, I'm…five?”_

_“I’d say he looks like you,” Peggy said, pulling a black and white photo from the file. “It’s meant as a compliment,” she added, handing it over._

_The newborn in the picture was in that stage of new where his features hadn’t quite settled yet. Given how long ago the picture was sent, she assumed that was no longer the case. He was a small thing, wrapped in what was sure to be a handmade blanket. Peggy watched the man sob openly for a bit, clutch the photo to him, before she pointed out his wife’s handwriting on the back. A date and a name, nothing more._

_The man who’d been broken since he walked in here shattered completely. He rambled again, switching languages, about how his Angie was going to kill him, leaving her with yet another boy to take care of. The boy didn’t even know who his father was. Oh God, Marco tried to ship Benny off to the circus, might’ve succeeded if Angel hadn’t been there to stop him, and Angel wasn’t now, what were his little devils doing to the poor boy?_

_Peggy let him, for awhile. She gave him a handkerchief, not entirely clean, but the best she had. She let him get the worst of it out and then, very gently, redirected him._

_There wasn’t a thing he wouldn’t tell her now._

_His fingers kept their death grip on the photo as he traced routes again, wiping his eyes with her handkerchief when the tears got in his way. She worried for the picture, that he’d ruin it with how tight he held on. She had another photo too, the oldest son in his dress uniform, but she wouldn’t give him that. It’d probably do more harm than good, under the circumstances, and set her back even further on time._

_Like before, he knew more than he thought he did, he just needed prodding, direction, needed to be told where to focus. He did not, Peggy realized, know about the weapons, the advanced monstrosities that, like Steve as he was now, had no right to exist in a sane universe. Most of the men who did know were dead, but not all. She had fresh leads, something else to do for the next day or two she’d spend without sleep._

_And Martinelli had a black and white snapshot, a dirty, tear-streaked face, and that crutch that didn’t fit, that wouldn’t be his for much longer._

_She left him long enough to speak with Colonel Phillips, to hand over the new intel. She took the long way back, in spite of the time crunch. When she returned, she was more careful about setting his updated file on the table. He was so enamored with the photograph that he barely seemed to notice._

_She thanked him for his cooperation as she sat down, made a point of using his full title and rank. Technician Forth-Grade. That was enough to tear his attention away from his son._

_“Fifth-Grade, Agent. Ma’am.”_

_“No, no,” Peggy said casually, as though she hadn’t spent the last several hours wringing the man dry. She reopened his file folder. “That information is officially out of date, Technician.”_

_“Que?”_

_“You’ve earned yourself a promotion or two. Acts of valor, your cooperation in this investigation. Don’t look at me like that, I had nothing to do with it. Those calls are above my pay-grade.”_

_She watched him, watched everything flash across his face. He was far past being able to cover anything up. She listened to the quiet way he thanked her, how his voice reverted to that barely-there thing it was before she told him about either of his children. Before she implied him a traitor._

_“The new rank will put you in charge of men,” she said._

_“Si,” he said, still clutching his photo like a lifeline._

_“I’m sure you’ll get used to the change. And the leg.”_

_His free hand went to the leg in question. “It’s nothing. Others, they got much worse.”_

_“Yes, they did. But it’s you who can’t walk well now.”_

_He grimaced. “The doctors, they say I’ll be fine. Just need a brace, something to stabilize it, some time—”_

_“You won’t have time, Technician. Especially with your promotion, congratulations by the way. Time and tide wait for no one, and neither do the Nazis. We need you back to work.”_

_“Yes,” he said quietly. “I, I know.”_

_“We’ve already arranged flights for the men who can still fight. You’ll get two weeks rest in England, then you’ll return to the Front.”_

_“Si, yes. I’ve heard.”_

_Peggy could see him swallowing, forcing down fear, arguments. “We need good, smart men like you to keep our communication lines going. In the mud, in the snow, on the mountains, wherever’s necessary.”_

_“If that’s what my country needs.”_

_Peggy hummed, watched the light brought back to his eyes by his children flickering, fading. “You’re a credit to your country. I’m sure your children will take comfort in that, when their father comes back half a man.”_

_“What…Agent, I—”_

_“That leg will not heal. The doctors know that. It won’t heal if you don’t let it, and we can’t have that. You’ll probably keep it, but you’ll lose feeling. Or end up with extreme pain from the nerve damage, the kind that doesn’t go away. All the climbing you’ll be doing, the rough terrain, that won’t help.”_

_“I’ll be doing it for my country,” he said, trying valiantly to keep his voice steady._

_“So you will. And when you get home, assuming you do, assuming you get lucky again? Not a small assumption, that. How you are now, if you come under attack again, you won’t outrun anything, won’t stand a chance.”_

_“That…devo correre il rischio.”_

_“That’s very brave. Very noble.”_

_“It’s what I have to do.”_

_“There’ll be no more carrying your children. Your newest, your Rosario, how old do you think he’ll be before you get to meet him, before we’ve finished this?”_

_The fading light in Martinelli’s eyes flickered to nothing._

_“All those boys waiting at home for you, and you won’t be able to run after them, play football. Won’t be able to keep your old job. Your wife and your eldest daughter will have that much more on their shoulders. What was your daughter’s name, Angie? She’s a good girl, you said. I’m sure she won’t mind picking up the slack for her father. Is that what you want, Technician?”_

_“I--there's nothing I can do. I was drafted. I can't desert and even if I was the kind, I'm in Italy. Where would I go?"_

_"Your old home, your old family."_

_“No! Mai. Never.”_

_“I see. You don’t want that. Do you want this, Technician, the alternative?”_

_“I don’t have a choice.”_

_“Please answer the question, Technician.”_

_“Che domanda?”_

_“Do you want to go home?”_

_It hung between them. Martinelli brought his hand up from his leg, rested it palm-down on the table. It shook, and Peggy was sure that, were he able to let go of the photo, he’d use his other had to pin it down, or lace the fingers together, try to disguise the tremble. If he could let go of the photo._

_“Agent, I don’t…” He was near tears again. " Perché è importante ciò che voglio?"_

_"Vuoi andare a casa?" She gentled her voice, softened it._

_“I, my country—”_

_"Your country would see you lose the use of your leg, run you ‘til there’s nothing left, and then discharge you for refusing to do your job."_

_It was a worst-case scenario, but that didn’t make it far-fetched, or even unlikely._

_“I was needed.”_

_“You were drafted.”_

_"Avevano bisogno di me."_

_"They needed bodies. Men to run lines. That’s all that matters to them. They are not your family, old or new. They will not care if you die, they will not care if you end up wishing you had, Do you want to go home, Technician Martinelli?"_

_He licked his lips, stuttered, probably thought she was testing him, tricking him. “I, I…” He swallowed hard. “Sì, voglio andare a casa. I want my family, Agent. They need me. I want to be with them. I want to meet my son, to hold him. I want—I miss my wife. But I was drafted. It's my job, my obligation."_

_Peggy looked at him, then lowered her gaze so she could make a note in his file. “It’s a shame then, Technician, that the damage to your leg is so extensive, that you’re beyond any hope of recovery,” she said, ignoring every word spoken by the doctors she’d talked to. “You’d do more harm than good in the field. You’d slow us down, we’d have to endanger more men trying to get you out. You’re a liability, I’m sorry to say. The best course of action, in your case, is to send you back to England with the others, let you heal up, and then ship you back to America with a medical retirement.”_

_Martinelli stared at her. He stared, and then he sobbed._

_“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Technician, but there’s no other choice here, I’m afraid. You’ll receive an honorable discharge, and your promotion will remain intact. This, of course, entitles you to a much higher pay scale when you get home. I hope that’s of some consolation to you. Thank you for your service, Technician Martinelli.”_

_Martinelli cried. Great, heaving sobs overtaking his frail body. Peggy closed his file, pretended not to notice._

* * *

It was Angie who pulled Peggy back to reality. She’d always been good at that, regardless of whether or not Peggy wanted it at the time. She joined them on the porch, squeezed in between Peggy and Angelo, forcing them to accommodate her.

“You guys want to hide away; you need a better spot.”

“Clearly,” said Peggy.

Angie bumped her hip against Peggy’s, reached over and snagged her cigarette.

“Would you like your own, darling?” Peggy drawled.

Angie gave her a look. “That would make me a smoker. Angela Martin can’t be a smoker. No, I don’t want another cigarette, and I resent you for asking.” She brought the smoke to her lips, dragged off it. “This is yours, not mine, I don’t smoke anymore and I never will, thank you very much.”

It was Angelo’s turn to cough like a pinked-lunged child. He coughed and laughed and wheezed, the sounds loud and full and so unlike what Peggy first heard from him in ’43.

Peggy took the spent cigarette Angie handed back to her. “Don’t kill your father on Father’s Day, it’s impolite.”

“So was you teaching Lizzie the words to God Save the Queen on Thanksgiving,” Angie replied.

“Ungrateful Yanks,” said Peggy.

“Tea-guzzling fascists. Easy, Dad.”

Angie thumped his back a few times. He calmed eventually, put an arm around her shoulder to pull her against his side. The door opened again, revealing Steve this time. He was carrying a glass of something Peggy recognized as Angelo’s preference, not his own.

“Told you this was a crappy hiding spot,” said Angie, leaning into her father’s warmth.

“Sorry,” said Steve. “The guest of honor has officially been missed.”

“You mean Sofia’s done wrangling the bambini del diavolo on her own,” said Angelo.

“Two things can be true at the same time,” Steve replied.

Angelo put out his cigarette, stepped out from between Peggy and Angie. “Don’t leave me alone in there too long. It is Father’s Day.”

He shared a last look with Peggy, bopped Angie’s nose, causing her to swat him away, took the drink from Steve’s hand as he passed. Peggy heard him yell something else about devil children as he reentered the house.

Steve took up position behind Angie, wrapping his arm around her from there. “Sit-rep, Carter?”

Peggy took another drink of wine. “I’m fine. Always.”

Angie scoffed. “See, we know at least half of that is a bald-faced lie.”

“We know no such thing.” Setting the drink back down, Peggy took Angie’s hand, their fingers laced together over the railing.

“I’m sorry,” Angie said after a moment. “I know he can be—”

“No,” said Peggy, squeezing the hand in hers. “No more of that. He’s as wonderful as his daughter, and if either of you apologizes again, I’ll knock your bloody heads together.”

Angie’s laugh was more a snort this time. “Look, Steve,” she said, blindly reaching up for his face. “I got one of the violent compliments. Today really is special.”

Steve agreed that it was, catching Angie’s hand and bringing it to his lips before leading it back down to the railing. He let his fingers stay there, holding one of Angie’s hands while Peggy still held the other.

“I love you,” Angie said after a few moments of quiet, not specifying who she meant, not needing to.

Steve kissed her hair, tightened his arm around her waist. Peggy squeezed her hand again.

After another moment, Angie squirmed in Steve’s hold, put her back to the railing so she faced him. She took her hand from Peggy’s.

“Thank you,” Angie said, no trace of teasing in her voice, eyes on both of them.

“Angie,” Peggy began.

“Nope, hush.” Angie brought a finger to Peggy’s lips, held it there. “You said no more apologies. Not an apology. You going to shut up until I’m finished?”

Peggy’s lips curved under the pad of Angie’s index finger. She nodded until Angie looked satisfied, took it away.

“Thank you,” she repeated. “You two, you were saving my family before you ever became my family.”

Peggy wasn’t sure anyone else besides Steve would notice the crack in Angie’s voice. It was so small, and Angie made a living as much by controlling her emotions as she did by wearing them on her sleeve. Angel might notice, that tremble in her voice, Sofia. Angelo.

Peggy didn’t know who initiated it. She thought it was Angie who stepped forward first, but her chest hurt and her eyes were blurring again, so who could say? What she knew for sure was that they were suddenly a mess of heat and heartbeats. Angie had one arm around both of them, a hand at the back of both their necks. The three-person embrace was slightly awkward due to the height differences between them, but they made it work. They always did.

* * *

After the tears, Therese felt better. Worn, and more vulnerable, in some unexplainable way, than she would’ve liked, but better.

Carol moved them to the bed after the worst of it passed, and Therese worked through the hiccups and sniffles that followed with a mountain of pillows behind her, and Carol still holding her.

Therese battled pangs of guilt over how long they’d spent on the sofa before Carol dared to ask anything of her. That couch wasn’t uncomfortable, not with Rindy to consider, but Therese was sure Carol would be achy tomorrow, despite repeated denials.

She would make it up to her, Therese resolved. Maybe a massage later. Such activities tended to lead to others, but Therese didn’t think they could tonight. Carol would understand, and soon, when they both felt better, Therese would thank Carol properly for her understanding.

For now, they made dinner. Breakfast was Carol on her own, taking the time to prepare several choices for Therese, none of which Therese could really enjoy. Dinner was simple and together, reheated soup, fresh bread from the baker a few blocks over.

Carol wasn’t quite as watchful, trusting Therese when she said the worst of the storm was done, but she kept up with small, grounding gestures. A hand on Therese’s back, a kiss to the cheek just because.

Therese loved her with an intensity she hadn’t thought possible, not after her father died.

Carol was at the stove, stirring the soup, when the phone rang. Therese was cutting bread.

Carol glanced at Therese. Therese gave her a smile. “Well? Go. It’s probably Rindy.”

“Or Abby, wanting to talk my ear off about her latest escapades with Rose,” Carol muttered, moving to the living room.

“It’s almost as if she knows how much you love hearing about them.”

“Cheeky. Don’t slice your fingers off, please, while you’re mocking me.”

Therese grinned.

The phone got through half a ring more before Carol picked it up, greeting the caller with her hip resting against the end table where the phone resided. Therese knew before Carol spoke that she had been right and Carol wrong. It was all in Carol’s face, in how her posture changed in the second or two before she answered.

“Hello, my darling! Did you have a nice time with Daddy and your brother?”

Therese smiled for a different reason, resumed cutting the bread. Carol hadn’t included Lilah in that, but given where they’d started out a few weeks ago, it was still an improvement.

“Really?” Carol asked in that voice that truly was just for Rindy. “That’s wonderful, sweetheart.”

Therese watched Carol listen, watch her absently twirl the phone cord around her finger, a move she often scolded Rindy for, insisting she had no idea where the child picked it up.

“No, I suppose he couldn’t help with Daddy’s breakfast. Rindy, honey, he can’t eat real food yet, how do you expect him to make it?”

Therese laughed.

“Yes, yes, maybe next year. But you had Lilah to help you, right? And I know Daddy loved it.”

Therese listened contentedly to Carol’s end of the conversation, finishing the bread, checking on the soup, getting bowls and plates and silverware when it was done. She’d just finished with the table when she heard her name, looked up.

Carol had the receiver lowered, one hand covering it. “She’d like to talk to Mama.”

It wasn’t phrased as a question, but Therese knew. Knew Carol would excuse her, promise tomorrow, if Therese didn’t feel up to speaking with Rindy.

Nothing, Therese realized after barely a second’s contemplation, could be further from the truth.

Carol gave Therese another of those just because touches when they traded the receiver, her fingers on Therese’s for longer than the task required. Another touch to the back of Therese’s neck, and they switched places, Carol returning to the kitchen to finish up before dinner.

“Hey, Rindy,” Therese said softly, hoping her voice wasn’t hoarse from crying. “How are you, sweetheart?”

“Hi, Mama!”

Rindy was bright and happy and excited. She told Therese how she’d helped take some of Sascha’s first Father’s Day photos, how he’d sat perfectly with Daddy, like a good boy, until he hadn’t anymore. About the breakfast she always helped make for Daddy today, the last few times with Miss Ava’s help, but this year with Mouses’s.

Rindy was Rindy. For all the ways today had been different—good and bad—Rindy was Rindy, and expected nothing more from Therese than to keep being Therese.

So she did. Happily.

By the time they’d finished up and Carol got back on the line, Therese felt both better and worse. She hadn’t lied this morning, telling Carol she missed Rindy. Had their normal schedule been in effect, Rindy would be leaving right around now anyway, but Therese still missed her. It was almost like she’d seen her again with fresh eyes, by describing her to a father Therese wasn’t sure could see anything at all.

She missed Rindy, and, after hearing her voice, the quiet in the apartment seemed louder.

She accepted, now, that it was okay to hurt. To feel the loss she’d been distancing herself from for fifteen years. She knew it was finally okay to hurt over it. She simply didn’t want to anymore, not today. She didn’t want to think of that pathetic grave marker and all the things it meant.

She could, easily. Probably would, in this quiet, the kind a TV or a record player couldn’t penetrate. She knew better than anyone, better than Carol thought she did, how quickly and deeply she could lose herself in her own thoughts.

Carol would pull her back. She always would. But Therese didn’t want her to have to.

“Okay, snowflake,” Carol said into the phone. “Can you put me back on with Daddy? I love you too. Yes. See you soon, my love.”

Carol tapped her fingertips against the table, said nothing for a moment. Therese sat at the kitchen table, happy to see Carol happy after all the mixed emotions of the day.

“Hi,” Carol said into the phone. “So, how was it? He got syrup _where_? How? Okay, that’s a new one for you. I’m glad I didn’t have to participate. Yes. Next week then? All right. Goodnight.” Carol was halfway to putting down the receiver when she hurriedly put it back to her ear. “Harge! Happy Father’s Day.”

It was said hastily, an afterthought, nearly forgotten entirely, but it was there.

“We’re back on schedule next weekend,” Carol said once she’d hung up. “You didn’t have to wait for me.”

Therese hadn’t served herself yet, only sat and watched Carol. “I know.”

Carol shook her head, smiling. “Well, allow me to serve us both, then. I’m famished, so you absolutely must be.”

Therese let Carol serve them. Her nausea during breakfast was replaced by a general lack of appetite around lunch. She’d been so overwhelmed by other feelings that the physical ones didn’t register. Carol had let her get away with it, not happily, Therese knew, but it wouldn’t continue.

Therese was fine with this. She was hungry, if not as starved as she should be. She ate without protest while Carol relayed Harge’s version of Father’s Day. It was significantly messier, both more and less exciting than what Therese was told on the phone.

Therese wanted this feeling, not the others. She had it, but it felt fragile, easily lost. It was Father’s Day. She was meant to remember the good, wasn’t she? Not that sad, neglected grave that represented everything after him, so much of it painful. Lonely.

They were finishing dinner, Carol nibbling on what remained of a piece of bread, when Therese spoke. “Carol?”

Carol set the bread down, said nothing, but showed Therese in every other way that she was listening.

“Would you mind very much if we went out again tonight?”

* * *

“Get off of me, woman,” Peggy groused, rolling in her lounger to swat Angie away from it. “Find another spot.”

“I like your spots,” Angie said, trying again to share the chair with Peggy. Again, she was rebuffed. “English!”

“No,” Peggy said, one hand on her stomach, the other covering her eyes. A fragile, put-upon pose that didn’t fit her at all. “I need my space. Must digest.”

Therese watched the exchange from the edge of the pool, her feet dangling over the side, in the water. She was glad they’d refused the offer-plea to attend the Martinelli Father’s Day celebration, but another offer had been made. They could stop by later, if they liked, help put a dent in the leftovers.

Therese hadn’t thought then that she’d like to, but was glad to find the chance was still there when she called to ask.

It was dark outside. A starry night lit by antics fairy lamps, placed strategically around the pool. Carol had been far too Carol about them, asking how old they were, if they were really antiques, or just reproductions. Peggy told her to stop being a shop owner, and just appreciate the pretty lights that outlasted two wars and several changes of royal staff.

Therese simply enjoyed the little domes, the changes in light they cast across the water.

“Oh quit it,” said Angie, plopping herself down on the end of the lounger Carol was occupying, forcing Carol to raise her knees to accommodate. “You didn’t even eat that much.”

“Darling, when your dear mother prepares enough for a full platoon, ‘that much’ is relative.” Peggy rubbed circles on her belly through the flowing summer dress she’d insisted was the only thing that would fit her anymore

Smiling at their antics, Therese reached for the glass of wine sat next to her by the edge, realized it was on its last drops. When they’d arrived, Angie produced something like six kinds of wine to choose from, while stating her opinion that red was preferable.

“Don’t even mention red wine,” Peggy had groaned. “I don’t want to think of anything heavy for the rest of my life.”

"Red wine's better."

"White wine is summer wine."

"Red wine is Italian."

"More reason to keep the bloody stuff away."

“Don’t fall in,” Peggy called from beneath her arm as Therese stood up now. “Were I required to rescue you, I’d sink like a stone.”

“I will rescue her, thank you,” said Carol, sipping from her own drink. Rather than keep her legs up to make room, Carol stretched her bare feet out, into Angie’s lap.

“Good,” said Peggy. “I don’t feel much like playing knight in shining armor tonight. And armor also leads to sinking.

“Don’t fall in,” Carol said, setting her drink on the small table next to her. “Really.”

“I’m not falling in,” Therese said, straightening up with the glass in her hand, moving away from the edge of the pool. “See?” She walked over to the others, a light tug on one of Angie’s curls her only answer to the shared space between Angie and Carol. “Going in for a minute, Anyone want anything.”

“A stretcher,” said Peggy. “I believe we still keep that in the attic.” She lowered her arm to speak to Therese, losing some of the drama of the pose. “Have a cannoli while you’re in there. We have about fifty in the fridge.”

“We ate before we came,” Therese said, for the third time.

“Why would you ever do that?” Peggy wondered, “I told you about all the gluttony that would happen today. Have a cannoli, Therese.”

“Hey. You’d better not be giving away the best dessert known to mankind over there,” Angie said. It almost sounded like a real threat.

“Italian-kind, maybe. It’s hardly the best.”

“Don’t you dare with that shit about treacle being better, not after eating at my mother’s table.”

Therese double-checked that Carol didn’t want anything, touched Carol’s hand on the arm of the chair as she moved between the furniture. “Have fun out here.”

Carol caught her hand, squeezed it briefly. She glanced at her own glass of wine. “What the hell,” she said, passing the glass over. “If you’re going in anyway.”

“That’s the spirit,” said Peggy. “And Therese? Check on Steve, won’t you, make sure the natives haven’t gotten him.”

Waving acknowledgement, Therese crossed to the patio doors, paused long enough to wipe her feet on the towel laid out there. Switching the two glasses to one hand, Therese opened the door and headed in.

The house was quiet, Steve not readily visible. He’d stepped in awhile ago to do the kids’ nighttime routine. Therese realized Peggy was right, that he’d been away longer than normal, but there were no thuds or screams, so it couldn’t be going critically bad.

She was passing the stairs when Steve began descending them, making no noise as he did. He stopped halfway between floors. He was in bare feet, like hers, shorts, a t-shirt.

“Here for a top-up?” he asked.

His voice was quiet, but Therese heard it fine in the otherwise silent house. “Yeah. And Peggy wants to know if you’re okay.”

Steve gave her a crooked smile. “What do you think, Miss Belivet? You want an honest to God, no bullshit, no mad scientists involved miracle?”

“Sure?” Therese was confused, had no idea what he was talking about, but he was much less likely to tease her for the sake of it than Angie or Abby were.

“Come here,” he said, gesturing for her to follow him.

Therese set the glasses on an end table near the stairs before climbing them. Steve led her down the hall, to the closed door of Jake’s nursery. Putting a finger to his lips, he eased the door open, moved enough that Therese could join him on the threshold.

“Oh my God,” she whispered.

“Yeah. Told you.”

Jake was sound asleep in his crib, having outgrown his bassinet. So too was Lizzie. They lay curled up together, both covered in separate but near-identical blankets made for them by Peggy. Lizzie’s tiny arm looked bigger than it was, covering Jake as it did.

“How?” Therese asked.

"He was being fussy. Not hungry, just a little lonely, and she got to him first. Think she's annoyed that darling Aunty Patrizia adores him and held him most of the night when Nonna and Nonno didn't have him. She might not like him, but she doesn't like others loving on him more than her."

“She just crawled in with him?”

Steve indicated the metal bars with a wave of his arm. “Just like a monkey, no problem at all.”

“Oh my God,” Therese said again. “The one time I don’t have my camera.” She rarely left it, but hadn’t planned on using it tonight, hadn’t planned on doing much of anything really, besides seeing her friends and hoping it was enough.

“Got a shot already. Yours would’ve been better, but at least I can prove to Peg and Ange it happened, once he wakes up for a feeding and she hates him again and denies ever being up there.”

Therese chuckled, the warmth caused by the wine becoming that much stronger. “Wow.”

“Right?”

They stood there together a little longer, enjoying the unchanging scene. Then Steve said something quiet about her drink. He gave the kids one more long, smiling look before shutting the door.

Back downstairs, Therese took a seat at the counter, with Steve on the other side of it. He poured into the two glasses, handed one to her. “Thank you,” she said.

He went to the fridge, came back with a cannoli in his hand. He touched it to her glass, a mock toast that left a smudge.

“How can you possibly be hungry when Peggy’s out there saying she’s going to burst?”

“I’m always hungry. Blame science.”

“You going to eat all of the ‘thank you for being a hero’ dessert?”

“There’s forty-three left.”

“Really? I thought Peggy was joking.”

“Peggy doesn’t joke about food. Angie’s mom? Definitely doesn’t. Feel free to grab, before Lizzie goes for all of them.”

Therese sipped her wine, saw the smudge on the glass where Steve touched it with his dessert. “God, I’m sorry,” she said, thinking of Lizzie, of Jake, of how big Rindy’s eyes would go if she saw that many sweets on offer. “I haven’t wished you happy Father’s Day, have I?”

Steve waved that off, bit into his pastry. “You’re fine. I’ve heard it plenty.”

“Well, anyway. Thank you for having us over on a family holiday.”

“You’re family,” Steve said simply, tongue darting out to catch a bit of cream at the edge of his mouth.

Richard said that once, and Therese had squirmed inside, unable to reconcile the statement. It fell easy on her ears now. “So. Was it as bad as Peggy made it out?”

Steve leaned in and rested an arm across the counter as he told her. About the usual Martinelli antics, about the boys who still carried the weight of the snowstorm, and Lizzie’s obliviousness to it, how she’d hugged them and tackled them and climbed them like jungle gyms until Steve saw real smiles on their faces. It was so different from anything Therese had known, from the things Carol told her about growing up in her quiet, ordered, upper-class household with her one sibling. Therese loved the Martinellis. She loved them in moderation, loved knowing she had her peaceful apartment with Carol to return to whenever they got to be too much, but loved them all the same.

“Why does Peggy hate it so much, having Angelo talk about her saving him?”

Therese regretted the question as soon as she voiced it. She hadn’t meant to say anything, especially not to him instead of Peggy.

“Sorry,” she said, “That’s, I don’t know what that was.”

“No, you’re fine,” Steve said. He’d long since finished his dessert. Now he wiped his fingers on a towel left on the counter.

“It’s none of my business,” Therese insisted, because she’d seen how his face changed, before he covered it up. “I probably shouldn’t have anymore,” she said, flushing as she pushed her wine glass. “Makes me stupid sometimes.”

“Hey,” Steve said, firmly enough that Therese instinctively looked up at him. “No, Therese. It’s okay.”

Steve held her gaze. Therese exhaled, relaxed, thought how he might never let it go otherwise.

“It’s okay,” Steve said. “It’s not a secret, it’s just,” he seemed to look past her for a moment. “Could be a lot of things,. Angelo was in rough shape when Peggy saw him. His connection to Angie, maybe she can’t see one without seeing the other. Sometimes when you’re home, with family, safe, the last thing you want to remember is all those times you weren’t. Sometimes hearing too much about the people you saved gets you thinking about all the ones you didn’t. Could be a lot of things,” Steve repeated. “Usually is.”

Therese accepted that. She would’ve accepted any answer he gave, but it made sense. He asked her about her day, and Therese tried not to think too much about the subject change. “I saw my father,” she said. “We did. His grave.”

Despite her earlier proclamation, Therese sipped more of her wine.

Steve didn’t try to hide his change of expression this time. “Did you?”

She hadn’t told him, or Angie, or anyone but Carol about what she wanted to do this year. It wasn’t a conscious decision, she didn’t think, but telling people meant expectations, meant having to tell them the result of those plans. If she’d lost her nerve, if she’d fallen to pieces even more than she ended up doing.

“Yeah,” she said. “It felt like something I should do.”

Steve nodded, but didn’t push for more.

“I’m glad I did,” she told him. “It was just, more than I expected.”

“Feel like talking about it?”

Therese thought, sorted through the light haze of the wine, the drain of the day. “It’s a lot of things,” she said, “a lot of things that don’t all go together.”

“I’m sure.”

“Carol, Carol said something earlier that, that _hit_ me, you know, and I wasn’t sure why. Why it affected me like it did.”

“Do you know why now?”

Therese tapped at the counter, listened to the muted voices from outside. Carol would be wanting that drink, assuming she hadn’t held herself over with some of Peggy’s or Angie’s. A big assumption. “She said Dad would’ve been proud of me, and it keeps sticking in my head. There’s, a lot there right now, it keeps changing, but that part sticks.”

“You don’t think she’s right?”

“I don’t know if she is or isn’t, and maybe that’s worse? I’m losing pieces of him every day. I’ve forgotten things. But I remember him as this good, kind, simple man who…I remember him as perfect. But that’s not right, is it?”

“Nobody’s perfect,” Steve said carefully, “but any dad doing half his job is perfect to his little girl. It’s not a bad thing, Therese.”

“I know that.” Angie told her nearly the same thing once. She saw it with Rindy, in a way she never could have before, how Rindy looked at Harge. “But most people, they grow out of it, don’t they? They start to see the flaws?”

What would happen if and when Rindy started to see the imperfections in Harge, when she learned of some of his mistakes? Would that come before or after she went through the same process with Carol?

“That’s what I hear,” said Steve. “Can’t speak from personal experience.”

Shit. She was really batting a thousand tonight. “I’m sor—”

“Therese? It’s okay. Just talk to me, if you want.”

Therese swallowed down the apologies that still wanted to come. Because she did want to talk to him. She’d just forgotten all about the other Rogers war hero, the one who never came home.

“I never saw the flaws,” she said. “I never knew—really—how he thought about things, important things. People, politics, things like that. I didn’t see the biases or the, the prejudices, or…”

“The prejudices,” Steve repeated. “You think he’d be ashamed, because of Carol?”

She hadn’t been able to pinpoint it before, what bothered her about Carol’s words. She didn’t know how she’d figured it out, but somewhere between asking Carol if they could come here, and then waiting the appropriate amount of time to call and ask if they could come here, it’d clicked in her head.

“Carol and I. Maybe. Probably. Aren’t most people ashamed of people like us? Repulsed? I think sometimes about how different things would be if he were here, but what kind of different? Maybe he’d be out of my life anyway. Maybe, maybe it’d be Carol gone, because if he’d lived, I wouldn’t have been able to…” Therese wished she’d stopped on the wine, wished she could communicate a full thought.

She took another sip rather than stopping, fairly sure she’d be mangling this explanation stone sober.

Steve didn’t answer right away. Therese could see him weighing his words, his options. The gifted war strategist, home in his kitchen, with whipped cream on his shirt.

“I didn’t know my father at all,” he said finally. “I don’t think he ever got to know I was going to exist, before he died. Getting mail delivered on the front is,” he gestured vaguely with one hand. “My mother, she liked telling me stories about when she was pregnant, alone, him gone. How no matter how scared or overwhelmed she got, he was the one that brought her back. She could think of him, how happy he’d be, how he’d need her to keep fighting, like he did.”

He was quiet again and Therese left him to it.

“She always said how proud he’d be,” Steve continued. “Of both of us. And I didn’t question it, for a long time. Even when I grew up enough to wonder, I never told her about it. She did everything for me, and she liked telling her stories. Who the hell was I to take that from her?”

“But you did wonder?”

Steve’s lips twisted in a wry smile, nothing like the one he’d worn upstairs with the kids. “I was a weak ass twig of a kid, Therese, more wrong with me than right. If Mom wasn’t a nurse, I’d have died long before the Army told everyone I was dead. She killed herself taking care of me, keeping me alive, giving me a life, and there wasn’t much I could do to help her out with that. How could I not wonder what my big, strong, war hero of an old man would’ve thought?”

“You never asked her?”

“Asking her would mean admitting that I doubted her.” Steve sighed, rubbed at the back of his neck as though there were pain there. Therese was almost sure there couldn’t be. “You’re right,” he said. “No matter what else your father could’ve been, he wouldn’t have been perfect. I mean, Peggy’s parents are Peggy’s parents. Angelo and Sofia are great, but they didn’t trust in Angie’s talent enough, told her to quit acting altogether, go to secretary school. There is no perfect parent.”

“Not even you?”

Steve scoffed. “Especially not me.”

“Peggy?”

“She makes us do weird British things with the kids.”

“Angie?”

“Weird Italian things with the kids.”

“Your mother?”

“My mother was a goddamn saint, and if I ever hear you say different, I know some government people who’d really love to talk to you.”

Therese laughed like she was supposed to, harder than she meant to. When she finished wiping a few stray tears away, Steve wore that soft smile again, looked pleased at a mission accomplished.

“You can’t know, Therese,” he said, posture still casual where he leaned against the counter, but with an earnestness in his voice. “We can’t know. So maybe, maybe take it as a good thing, as much as that’s possible.”

“A good thing?”

“Like you said, you never had to see the flaws. Neither did I. Maybe that’s the only thing we get, when we lose them that early. My Dad, he could’ve been a mean drunk. Maybe he was really bad with money. Maybe he was a Red Sox fan.”

Therese laughed again, glad Steve was making her. She’d meant to not get too far into her head again. Clearly that wasn’t going well. At least Steve was making her laugh.

“My mother wanted mine to be perfect to me, for me. Yours, you remember him that way. Maybe we let them stay that way for us. Maybe that’s…maybe that’s part of letting them be at peace, and us too.”

Therese listened to the muted sounds of Carol and the others outside, none of them sounding entirely sober. Bright, they sounded, under the darkness of the night sky, and Therese was glad she’d come here. “You’re pretty smart, you know. For a weak ass twig of a kid.”

“It’s the serum.”

“No, it’s not. Hey, do you still know things about the stars?” she asked. She remembered him and Peggy saying how they’d look at them to pass the hours, find the familiar shapes during missions, assuming they weren’t being shot at, at the time.

“Betty Grable, Marlene Dietrich stars?”

“The ones outside, the constellations.”

“I know a bit, Why?”

“My father used to teach me. I think I’d like to get back into it, learn more.” Remember the things he’d given her that time had taken away.

“I know a bit,” he repeated. “Want to head back out there, see if we can’t scrape off the rust?”

“Yeah,” Therese said, and meant it, very much.

Therese took the wineglasses, hers and Carol’s. Steve held the door open for her when they went outside. Angie was curled up next to Peggy in the lounge chair, proving how meaningless Peggy’s earlier protests were.

“Hey,” said Carol, holding out her hand as Therese approached. “I started to worry I’d lost you in there.”

“Wouldn’t ever happen,” Therese replied, holding out Carol’s glass.

Carol took it, but set it aside on the table, immediately freeing up her hand. She kept it held out and Therese took it, settling herself against Carol as Carol set There’s glass next to hers. She kept her fingers entwined with Carol’s, relaxed into a beautiful night. She put her head against Carol’s shoulder, smiled.

A few feet away, Steve leaned over the chair his wives were sharing, arms braced on either side of them.

“Nope, finder’s keeper’s,” Angie said, tightening the arm she had across Peggy’s waist.

“Finder’s keeper’s?” Steve repeated. “You really do turn into a child as soon as you come home for a few hours, don’t you?”

Angie stuck her togue out at him.

“Leave that where it is,” said Peggy, tapping Angie’s cheek. “Do not start something you can’t finish, darling.”

“Who the hell says I can’t finish it?” Angie asked.

“I do, at least if you intend to have me in the middle. I promise you, that won’t be happening tonight.”

“English,” Angie whined.

“Blame your mother, and her wretched cannoli.”

“Hey, hey, hey. Don’t you badmouth the cannoli, Peg, or you’re the one getting kicked off this chair.”

“Really?” Steve asked.

“Maybe,” said Angie. She reached up, pulled him down by his shirt, kissed him. “But she’s softer than you, cuddlier, and right now I like cuddly, even if she is kinda mean on the inside.”

“You do say the sweetest things,” Peggy said, yawning.

“You’re welcome. But yes, finder’s keeper’s, yes, I haggled my ass off for this spot, babe, so go find your own.” Angie kissed him again, then gave a playful shove on his chest.

“Father’s Day,” Steve said, straightening up, “and this is how I get treated? Okay. Find my own spot it is.”

Therese hadn’t given the interaction her full attention, didn’t, until she heard a sudden curse from Peggy.

“Steve,” Angie said, “I will literally kill you. I’ll find a way.”

As Therese watched, Steve saluted Angie, then took off at a run. Backward. He made it to the edge of the pool, jumped, did some kind of complicated spin in the air, still backwards. Carol swore this time, loudly, and Therese remembered last month, the soaking he’d given them under the guise of helpfulness. She flinched, hid against Carol, braced.

The expected tidal wave didn’t hit. The sting of chlorine threatening her eyes didn’t come, so Therese opened them. She hadn’t heard a splash, but there Steve was, floating lazily on his stomach, chin resting against the splayed-out fingers of both hands.

“You’re such an ass,” Angie declared. Discarded shoes lay in a pile near the chairs. Angie grabbed one, threw it half-heartedly into the pool, nowhere near Steve, though she couldn’t have hurt him with an accurate throw, and Therese knew that, even tipsy, her aim was better than that.

“I saved your father’s life,” said Steve as the shoe plopped into the water, making more noise on landing than Steve’s entire body had.

“Two things can be true at the same time,” said Angie.

“That was my shoe,” said Carol. “You do realize that was my shoe, Angela?”

“I… didn’t, Carol. Honestly. You have great taste, by the way.”

Therese laughed. Hard. Harder than the situation warranted. Tears threatened to cloud her eyes again.

“It’s not funny,” Carol said, like she did when she tried to be grumpier than she was.

“I know,” Therese promised, then burst into fresh giggles when she dared to look at Carol’s sandal drifting in the pool.

“You are absurd,” Carol muttered, but only held Therese tighter as she shook.

Steve rolled onto his back in the water, face to the sky. “So, Therese, you wanted to know about constellations?”

* * *

Peggy clicked the door shut behind her, turned on her office light. The familiar cherrywood and cream-colored walls greeted her. Crossing to the antique desk by the windows (she’d give it to Carol one day if she ever felt the need for a replacement, the woman practically drooled over it), Peggy ran her fingers along the edge. Finding what she needed, she pressed the switch built into the wood, opening the miniature bar hidden inside.

Carol was envious of that feature too, Peggy was sure.

She found the bourbon she refused to keep downstairs, found a shot glass, poured. She could hear the shower running a few rooms away, Steve cleaning up after showing off.

She sat down, let the scent of the drink hit her before tasting it. She was surrounded by photographs of the rich and famous, by the artwork of her husband and daughter, by posters from Angie’s Broadway shows.

And the medals. So many medals, plaques, things she’d never display anywhere else. Proof of her heroism. The most prominent things in this room though, were the portraits, always the portraits. The folded flags and dogtags that went with them. Steve’s, from when he was still meant to be dead, and the other. The dark-haired man next to him in death, as he’d always been in life.

Peggy sipped at the bourbon.

So many men in so few days. When Angie came into her life, when they realized they were linked long before then, Peggy had to pull the old reports to have any recollection of Angelo Martinelli Sr. at all. Even then, it was only bits and pieces, until she finally saw him again. Hale and healthy, with no sign of the limp. It only came back on the longest of days, he said.

God, but those days after the 107th rescue were long.

_“Do you want to go home?”_

Peggy heard her words echoing in her head, like a side effect of too many drinks she hadn’t had. She looked at James Barnes, hung up there with Steve, proud and handsome, and at least part of the reason Angie’s father still lived.

Steve would’ve gone anyway. He couldn’t let those men suffer and die, be written off as more statistics. He would’ve gone, but Bucky Barnes among the captured? Steve would never leave his best friend behind, could never live with himself.

She still remembered James leading the cheer when Steve returned with the men, men presumed dead, just like Steve. Phillips had put Steve’s death on Peggy’s shoulders, because she’d aided in the mission. And then in walked Steve, the other Commandos. The men who would become integral to Peggy’s existence for the duration of the war, and beyond.

The men she’d trusted with her life, who’d trusted her with theirs.

_“Do you want to go home?”_

Barnes. Steve’s best, probably only friend, for more than two decades. She met his eyes through his portrait. He was one of them, the men she’d trusted, and vice-versa.

That day, when Steve and Barnes and Dugan came back, when Angie’s father came back. A triumph even she had begun to think impossible, with three days of radio silence. But after? Anything was possible then.

Peggy couldn’t have imagined what would come less than two years later. Barnes plunging to his death, still reaching for Steve’s hand. The bombed-out bar where the three of them, she and Barnes and Steve, had once stood together, talking of the end of the war. The future.

_“Did you believe in your friend? Did you respect him? Then stop blaming yourself. Allow Barnes the dignity of his choice. He damn well must’ve thought you were worth it.”_

Words echoing back again. Words for Steve, after Barnes died. The only time Peggy ever truly worried that Steve might be broken, might not get back up.

There was a soft knock on her door. Peggy flinched, glad she couldn’t be seen. The shower wasn’t running anymore, she realized. She set the drink down. “Enter, if you dare,” she called.

Steve did. Freshly clothed, shirt open, a towel over his shoulder, hair still damp and out of place. “Hey,” he said, closing the door behind him. “Therese and Carol are going to take the guestroom, get out of here early in the morning.”

“Good. It’s been a day, that’s too long of a drive.”

“It has been a day,” he agreed. Stepping further into the room, bare feet on hardwood, he rested a hip on the edge of her desk, eyeing the half-full bourbon. “Sit-rep, Carter?”

“Fuck off, Rogers.” She reached for his hand, squeezed. “I’m fine, darling. Just needed a bit of the stuff too good for the guests.”

“You sure?” He traced his thumb over the back of her hand.

“Are you questioning a superior officer?”

“Do I get an official reprimand if I say yes?” He kissed her, then stole a sip from her bourbon. “Coming to bed soon? Angie misses you.”

“Just Angie? I’ll be right there.”

“Okay.” He squeezed her hand one more time, pushed off the desk.

Peggy watched him go, listened to the click of him closing her door, restoring her privacy. She held onto his smile, the one she’d feared never seeing again after Barnes.

After James.

_“Do you want to go home?”_

With Steve gone, Peggy turned her attention back to the portraits. Steve’s and James’s. Always together. Her eyes stung, a delayed reaction to the bourbon.

_“Do you want to go home?”_

_“Agent Carter.”_

_“Sergeant. You were tortured, experimented on.”_

_“I know. I was there.”_

_“Which means you don’t need to be here anymore. Do you want to go home?”_

_"Yes, goddamn it! but I'm not. I'm not getting a foot away from this fucking battlefield so long as Steve's being an unrelenting, unspeakably dumb asshole about fighting for our country, okay?”_

_“Steve is not the same man you knew, Sergeant.”_

_“Why, because he’s stronger? He can throw a punch now without breaking his arm? No, he’s still Steve. All the things that make him Steve, still there. He still needs me. I'm staying, Agent Carter. Til the end of the line, I'm protecting my brother. Got it?"_

_"Then it seems, Sergeant Barnes, you're fit for duty. You'll get two weeks recovery before we set out again."_

Angelo Martinelli Sr. chose his family. So did Barnes, earlier that morning. Peggy signed off on both their files, both their choices. She sent Angelo home to his family to Angie, and kept Barnes on the path that would eventually lead to the train tracks, the mountains, the fall.

Peggy looked at Barnes’s portrait, drained the last of her bourbon. Leaving the glass, she stood up, crossed the room, shut the lights off, locked the door. She went down the hall, to her family, to Steve leaving Barnes in the dark, next to Steve’s portrait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While things in this series are planned out to a certain extent, I'm always anxious to check out prompts, or just to hear from you guys. Hit me up on Tumblr if you're so inclined.
> 
> http://cblgblog.tumblr.com/


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, been quite the eventful minute since we last saw each other, huh? Hope everyone’s staying as safe and healthy and sane as one can in these times. My friends and family are healthy, which is great, not so great that I was quarantined with my parents for about two months. That is…not my ideal creative environment, for many reasons, but words still got writ. The only defense I can truly offer for the delay is that there are many, many words. Any and all of which you should feel free to comment on when you’re finished. God, so many words, why do I hurt myself this way?
> 
> Couple disclaimers, mind the tags. There’s some mild D/S elements here, and reference to an act of accidental violence related to PTSD. There’s also sex between Stegginelli, which in this case means that there’s W/W action, but Steve’s an active participant. So, in fiction and in life, forge onward and be wary of unwanted penises.
> 
> Finally, there is one (1) line in the novel about Carol's older sister living in Virginia. I took that line and ran with it, to places I'm sure Patricia Highsmith never intended. I'm sorry, you dear lady legend, for what I continue to do to your work.

“Good God. Did Captain America knock over a toy store?”

“Did he knock over all the toy stores?” Therese asked, adding her question to Carol’s.

Angie shrugged. “Birthdays. Kind of a low haul this year.”

“Low?” Carol repeated, feeling more than entitled to her incredulity.

Embarrassment of riches didn’t do it justice. She’d walked into Angie’s home with Therese and Rindy, ill-prepared for the sight before her. The entryway was lined with boxes on either side. Boxes and bags and ribbons, a blinding array of colorful paper, most of it red, white and blue. The living room was just as bad. The TV and surrounding area were clear, and the packages weren’t stacked six high like in the front room, but Therese still claimed she was having unpleasant flashbacks to the Frankenberg’s stockroom at Christmas time.

Rindy was, only somewhat quietly, losing her mind with glee.

Jacob Rogers was in a box. Carol wasn’t sure who put him there, or why, or how long he’d been that way, but he was tearing up wrapping paper, bare except for a diaper and the odd bits of wrapping paper stuck to him. His whole body shook with giggles.

“Cap’s birthday,” Angie said, gesturing them into the kitchen (entirely clear of packages, Angie swore her kitchen would remain untouched). “Steve’s, then Lizzie’s? All the good, God-fearing, flag waving patriots of America want to send us stuff. At least half of them want favors back. One for the road?” Angie asked, opening the fridge and loading things into a cooler.

Carol and Therese both declined the drinks, and Angie refused their offer of help, entreating them to “take a load off.”

They were supposed to be heading to the beach. Carol wasn’t sure they’d be able to drag Rindy from the house.

“What kinds of favors?” Therese asked, stepping over boxes, peeking into bags and open packages, while Carol pulled up a stool by the counter.

“All of them,” Angie said simply.

“But what—”

“All of them, Therese. I mean it.”

Lizzie came bounding into the room, a pair of bright purple shorts worn over her swimsuit. “Hi!”

“Hey, sweetheart,” said Carol. “Happy birthday. I’m sorry no one remembered it this year.”

Therese snorted.

“Thank you,” said Lizzie, in the way of a just turned five-year-old who’d been trained to say it. “It’s my real birthday today, but the party was before, but today’s just for us.”

“We’ve heard,” said Therese. “Happy birthday, sweetie.”

“Thanks,” said Lizzie and then grabbed Rindy’s hand, chattering away as she dragged Rindy into the city of boxes that used to be a living room

“They send all this here?” Therese asked, back to studying the packages in disbelief.

Angie shook her head, transferring wrapped sandwiches into the cooler. “You kidding? We’d never get any sleep, signing for packages for two straight months. Post office has a place for them. And Peggy’s guys take them too, make sure there’s nothing bad.”

“Peggy has ‘guys’ who sort through your birthday presents?” Carol asked.

“Peggy has guys for everything. I feel worse for the ones who have to rewrap the stuff.”

“Jesus.”

“Right?”

Therese dug through a brightly colored gift bag, came back with a teddy bear wielding its own version of Steve’s shield. “Don’t you guys already have every Cap item ever made.?”

“Yes. You’d think the adoring public might realize that, considering.” Angie sounded more amused than annoyed.

“What,” Therese put the bear back, retrieved an elaborately beautiful dress from a different box, the kind Lizzie would ruin within an hour of putting it on. “What on Earth is she going to do with all this?”

“We’re sorting donation piles,” Angie said, popping her head out from behind the open fridge. “See? Kiddo’s found a helper already.”

Lizzie and Rindy were plopped down on the floor next to Jake, both with a pile of presents in front of them. Rindy was holding a baby doll life-like enough to leave Carol slightly disturbed.

“Mommy, can I have this?” Rindy asked.

“You have a real baby at your father’s house,” Carol replied. “You don’t need another doll.”

“But Mommy, this is a girl doll.” Rindy tugged at the toy’s tiny dress to make her point. “Sascha can’t wear girl clothes.”

Lizzie looked up midway through tearing the paper off a basketball. “Yes he can. Mama put dresses and stuff on so many of my uncles that Nonna doesn’t know how come more of them ain’t queers.”

Rindy looked at Lizzie, then Jake, who had part of a bow stuck to his face. Her eyes and mouth both widened.

“And, Harge is going to go back to hating me again,” Carol said, the words muffled by Jake’s giggles and the sound of tearing paper. “Thank you for that.”

Angie waved her off, shut the cooler first, then the fridge. “She’s a little girl with a littler brother. At some point, Carol, that boy was always going to be in a dress.”

“We can’t keep everything,” Lizzie told Rindy, taking the doll and placing it in what Carol guessed was a donate pile. “Because I’m a princess and I’m spoiled rotten,” she said factually, “and I have lots of things, but there are poor little kids and orphans and people who don’t have anything, so they need it more than me and Jakey.”

Rindy was still eyeing the doll. “Mama’s a poor orphan. Can Mama have it?”

“Rindy!” Carol said.

Therese only laughed, blushed a little. “Sorry, Rindy. I’m not all that poor anymore, so maybe we should let another little girl enjoy the doll.”

“Oh,” said Rindy, very disappointed that Therese was no longer alone and impoverished.

“Who actually gets all this stuff?” Therese asked, still picking through the riches.

“Bunch of places,” Angie replied, crossing to the counter to sit opposite Carol. “Hospitals, poor families, there’s a whole list. Big list. Why?”

“Just, the place I grew up, the school, they never had much. I thought maybe—”

“I’ll check the list. If it’s not there, I’ll get it there.”

Therese stopped rummaging, raised her eyebrows at Angie. “You want to know the name first?”

“I know the name.”

“Do you?”

“You told me.”

“Once, maybe.”

“And?” said Angie, then gave the name correctly.

“Huh.”

“I’ll check the list. Dope.”

Carol didn’t know what part of the exchange affected her more, Therese so quickly thinking to give the children in her place better than what she’d had, or Angie, who probably did only hear the name once or twice before, because Carol had lived with Therese for years, and her number couldn’t be much higher. “You get this kind of haul every year?” she asked, not quite past her initial shock.

“Why do you think we had the party at my parents’ house?” Angie replied, gesturing at the mess.

“Honestly? I thought because it was going to be pure hell, and your parents are used to it.”

Steve, in a coincidence that was painfully on the nose, had a July 4th birthday. Lizzie’s was three days later. There’d been a joint celebration on the holiday a few days earlier, that Carol had yet to recover from. She saw flashes of red and blue in the corner of her vision sometimes, just before bed.

Outside, the Martinelli house had been all red, white and blue, with flags everywhere. Inside, the color palette altered slightly. Red, white and blue became red, blue and yellow. Carol and Therese both assumed a Captain America theme, but found instead a young man with dark, slicked back hair in a Superman outfit, posing for photos and hefting small children around like they were no heavier than the endless cups of punch (spiked and otherwise) on offer. Superman was, as Carol understood it, one of the endless Italians in the neighborhood, with a passion for fitness and, at one point in time, Angie’s twin brother.

There was music and burgers and daytime fireworks, and a pinata (with miraculously only one near miss, and Peggy grabbed the poor boy before the bat could reach his face). There were many, many children, many photos taken, mostly by Therese. Rindy, Lizzie, and seemingly every child within several of the New York boroughs had a ball.

Of the two of them, Therese was more connected to church, religion, but Carol wasn’t above hoping to God she’d never have to experience anything like that party ever again.

Her war flashbacks were interrupted by hurried footsteps. Steve entered the living room clad in shorts and sandals. He didn’t say anything to Carol or Therese until Therese greeted him first. The “hey,” in reply wasn’t quite throwaway, but certainly distracted.

“Jake,” he said to the giggling baby, then turned to Angie. “Shouldn’t he be dressed?”

“Peggy said you were doing it.”

“Peggy said she was doing it.”

“What did I say?” Peggy asked, joining them in the room.

“He’s not dressed,” Steve said as Jake happily pounded his fists against the bottom of his box.

Peggy looked at the baby, looked at Steve. “Why not?”

“You were supposed to do it.”

“I’ve been outside, getting the chairs out from behind all that rubbish in the garage. Which is what I was meant to be doing. You were meant to dress him.”

“I was packing the beach bag.”

Peggy made a noise of annoyance. “Splendid. I’ll unpack it then, you dress him.”

“Unpack it,” Steve repeated.

“You forget things. And what you don’t forget gets thrown in all roughshod.”

“I don’t forget things. Serum.”

“And yet.”

“What’s to forget? It’s an east coast beach day, not Sword Beach.”

“What, precisely, would you know about packing for beach invasions? You stormed Sword with nothing but a shield and a Thompson.”

“I _took_ Sword with nothing but a shield and a Thompson.”

“Thus giving gullible, foolhardy boys past, present, and future another heroic battle fantasy to aspire to. Well done.”

Carol looked at Therese, read from her expression that she wasn’t just imagining things, imagining the edge of something unfamiliar here.

“All right, kids.” Angie stood up. “Be nice, or timeout for you, which means you don’t get to come out and have fun with the rest of us. Which isn’t allowed, ‘cause I’m not doing beach day with our spawn alone. So, nice.”

The only one who spoke after that was Jake, babbling happily in his own language, with pink wrapping paper sticking to his belly.

“Daddy, he’s a Jake in the Box!” Lizzie declared. She laughed at her own joke, which set Rindy off, and their giggles made Jake laugh harder.

Steve’s shoulders rose and fell visibly with his next breath. “He is, isn’t he? Jake in the Box.”

Peggy eyed Steve, seemed to have a conversation with him, then broke the contact. She looked around the room, her gaze finding Carol and Therese. “Ladies. Morning.”

Carol wondered if it was at all possible that Peggy Carter hadn’t noticed them before now. “Morning,” she said.

“Hi,” said Therese. “I can dress Jake, if you like. I know his room well enough by now, where everything is.”

Carol’s stomach gave an unpleasant twinge. Her mind went back to that first Sunday night, Therese offering to trek out into an unfamiliar neighborhood to get Carol her cigarettes.

“No, no, I got him,” Steve said, and he sounded like Steve. He crossed to the kids, crouched down. “And what are you doing in there little man, huh?”

“He’s being Jake in the Box,” Rindy said, grinning.

“He is. Hi, Rindy.”

“Hi,” said Rindy.

“You feel like going to the beach?”

“Yes.”

“You sure?” Steve asked, pulling an exaggerated frown of concern over her answer.

“Yes!” Rindy laughed.

“What about you, Lizzie Girl? You want to go to the beach?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes!” Lizzie insisted, somewhere between excitement and exasperation.

“Are you really, really sure?”

“Yes!” This time the answer came from both girls at once.

“Well then let’s go to the beach!” Steve said feigning impatience.

Abandoning her half-unwrapped package, Lizzie ran forward, tackle-hugging him. Rindy followed suit, and soon Steve had his arms full of both girls as they grabbed at him, a faux wrestling match that only lasted a few seconds before Jake let out a high pitched squeal at being left out.

“I surrender!” Steve called. “I surrender, I surrender, I’m sorry!”

Carol watched the scene, thinking of how much Harge would hate it. He was more willing than most fathers to play with his children, but his activities with Rindy usually involved puzzles, board games, reading a book together. Nothing like what Steve did with Lizzie, what he was doing with Rindy now.

Red-faced and excited enough that the drive to the beach would undoubtedly be miserable for everyone else, the girls let Steve playfully push them away. “Beach, Daddy!” said Lizzie, nearly bouncing.

“Yes, yes, definitely beach.” He took a still squealing Jake from the box, let the baby grace him with a drooly kiss. “Did you get your bag ready like we talked about?”

Lizzie stopped bouncing. “I forgot.”

“Elizabeth.”

“Apparently the serum doesn’t work so well on the second generation, Captain,” said Peggy. “Our daughter’s recall isn’t as perfect as yours.”

“Unless she’s remembering something to hold against us. Always kicks in then,” said Steve.

“Oh, always.”

If she hadn’t witnessed it, Carol wouldn’t believe there’d been tension between them minutes earlier.

“Sand toys, towel, sandals and whatever other toys you absolutely have to have,” Steve told Lizzie. “No army men. Nothing small enough to lose.”

“I won’t lose anything.”

“Just like you won’t forget anything?” He tapped her nose with the hand not supporting Jake. “Pack, not play, or we’ll never get to the beach.” He looked at Rindy. “Can you be a big girl, make sure Private Rogers here follows orders?”

Rindy told Steve yes, gave him a salute. Carol heard Therese laugh.

“Come on, come on, come on, get going!” Steve urged as the girls pounded their way up the stairs. When they were gone, he stood up easily, Jake still in his arms. “They are not going to do anything I just said.”

“Nope,” said Angie.

“Clearly,” said Peggy. “Well then. I take girls, you take boy?”

“Sounds good,” Steve replied.

With a promise she’d be right back, Peggy followed after Rindy and Lizzie, not before detouring to plant a red lipstick kiss on Jake’s cheek and brush her fingertips against Steve’s.

“Sorry,” Steve said. “Long week. All these parades and monuments they’re making me go to, you know?”

“Sure,” said Therese. “We know all about that, why wouldn’t we?”

“Sarcasm doesn’t suit you,” Steve replied. He went to Angie, Jake still in his arms. He took her hand in his free one, kissed it. “Sorry,” he said again. “Too many birthdays, too many people, not—”

“Not knowing your own age?” said Angie. “No, seriously, every goddamn year. Do you count the time he was under the ice, preserved like a slab of beef, do you not? Everyone’s got an opinion.”

“And?” Carol said, “What’s yours?”

“Whatever’s more convenient for me at the time,” said Angie. “But Mr. Beef here is right, long week. Press stuff and package stuff, and—”

A loud bang kept Angie from finishing. Steve flinched. He pulled his hand from Angie’s almost in a blur, closed his fist. Angie rubbed her thumb over his knuckles, coaxed his hand open so she could take it again.

“And that,” she said uncharacteristically terse. “There’s that.”

It was the 7th and a weekend. Fireworks were still happening, would for at least another day, Carol figured. Steve was frowning deeply, jaw clenched. “You okay?” she asked

“Yeah. Enhanced hearing. Fireworks.”

“There were fireworks at Lizzie’s party,” said Therese.

“There were fireworks pretty much everywhere I’ve been this week. Told you, long week.”

“What about him?” Carol asked, nodding to Jake who was happily nuzzling his face into Steve’s shirt. She and Therese hadn’t heard about anything extra that might’ve come from the serum, but Rindy—an average baby to most everyone besides Carol and Harge—used to startle easily from the loud displays.

“No idea,” Angie said promptly. “He doesn’t even blink at ‘em.”

“Not Lizzie either?” Carol asked, only now remembering the earmuff looking things Lizzie sometimes wore around the house.

“She likes them if she knows they’re coming,” said Steve. “She likes the colors. Otherwise they annoy her sometimes, but that’s it.

“And you?” Carol asked, noting that Angie had yet to let go of Steve’s hand,

“They annoy me too,” he said. He slipped his fingers from Angie’s, turned to walk away. “Beach. Let me dress Jake in the Box and we’ll go.”

* * *

“Peggy, he’s trying to eat the sand again. Hey Shutter, can you pass me one of those chicken wraps?”

Therese reached into the cooler, closer to her chair than to Angie’s. “Beer too?”

“I love that you know me so well.”

They’d found a relatively secluded section of beach, considering the number of people still celebrating the holiday. Therese wouldn’t be able to treat Carol the same way she did when they were at home, but they had plenty of space to themselves.

Therese, Carol, Peggy and Angie had all taken to sunbathing. Therese took some photos earlier in the day, spent time with Rindy and Carol in the shallow surf, but was now content to watch Steve lead the kids in their water adventures. He was in the shallows with Rindy and Lizzie, the three chasing and hollering and throwing a beach ball between them.

Jake, it was discovered, hated beach water just as much as he did the stuff in the pool. He also hated dry sand. Wet sand, though, he adored. So much so that he was, as Angie pointed out, once again trying to eat it. The flyaway wisps of hair he was beginning to sprout (enough that he couldn’t strictly be called bald anymore but not enough that anything could be done with them) blew in the warm breeze.

“Oh my darling boy,” Peggy sighed, sitting up from where she’d been reclined on the chair. Jake was a few feet away, hands sunk into a pile of wet sand created by Lizzie’s toy bucket and a quick trip down to the water.

Lizzie hadn’t strictly listened to Steve. Several of her tiny army men were half-buried in the wet sand, abandoned after Lizzie got bored of playing with her brother. As far as they knew, he hadn’t eaten any of those, despite his best efforts

Carol’s beach chair sat between Therese’s and Angie’s. Rather than passing over the food and drink Angie requested, Therese tossed first one then the other underhand, over Carol’s body. She got an eyeroll from Carol for it, but Therese was hardly paying attention. Peggy was standing now, stretching her body out. She wore sunglasses, a one-piece swimsuit, and a pair of shorts over it.

If Carol in beachwear was her favorite thing about days like this (unquestionably true), then Peggy in beachwear was a close second. Or third. Angie had taken to wearing those bikini suits, which made it harder for Therese to figure out preference order. Or anything really. She’d feel bad if Carol hadn’t been so quick to claim the chair right next to Angie.

Peggy was on Angie’s other side, furthest from Therese, which she found slightly unfair. But Peggy had to walk past Therese to get to Jake before he ingested too much sand, so that was something. Therese watched Peggy’s movements from behind her sunglasses as Peggy went to the baby, bent to still his hands.

Then Therese lifted the sunglasses to the top of her head, had to see if what she was looking at was what she thought. When Peggy crouched down, her shorts rode up, exposing a patch of black and blue on her left thigh that disappeared upward, behind the material of the shorts.

“Hey,” said Therese. “Peggy, what happened there?”

“Hmm? Oh, that. Fitness mishap,” she said while Jake tried stuffing sand into her mouth instead of his own.

“Fitness?” said Carol, seeing what Therese had. “Did you drop a dumbbell on your leg?”

“The hazards of sparring with a super soldier,” Peggy said cheerfully.

“Sparring?” Therese asked.

“They beat each other up, but not really,” said Angie, popping open her beer. “It’s like practice fighting. Sometimes they’re dumb about it, but it’s always hot.” Angie scooted forward in her chair. “Speaking of hot,” she said to Therese, “I had a favor to ask you.”

It took several minutes for the favor to be explained. While Therese listened, Lizzie and Rindy were tossing the beach ball between them, doing their best to keep it from Steve. Jake buried his hands in wet sand while Peggy kept his from getting it into his eyes or mouth. Mostly.

All of which Therese paid minimal attention to, her focus held by Angie, and Angie’s rather ludicrous proposal.

“You want me to what?”

“Take my pictures, like always.”

“This isn’t like always, and they’re not really your pictures, are they? They’re Mrs. Marinara’s or whoever’s.”

Angie glared, biting into the last of her cold chicken wrap. “Miss Italia’s, thank you very much,” she said, wiping her fingers on the edge of a beach towel. “Anyway, I am she and she is me, so yeah, still my pictures. Which you’ve done a fabulous job with, for years now.”

“That’s just home stuff, Angie, for fun—”

“Except for the ones that ended up front page of the _Times_.”

“Mostly home stuff. Not movies. What do I know about photographing for movies?”

“About as much as all of us know about making them. Perfect fit.”

It wasn’t that Therese particularly disliked the idea of photographing a half-naked Angie in what she called her “proto costumes.” She simply wasn’t the best one for the job, something she told Angie. Again.

“Listen,” Angie said. “I know you’re busy--”

“That’s not it,” Therese said, even though she was.

“—and I know it still freaks you out some, when you get all hot and bothered by any gal that isn’t Carol.”

“That’s not true,” said Therese.

“Yes, it is,” said Carol, as she applied more sunscreen to her arms.

Therese glared at her.

“And I know you don’t want to have your whole career be based on Captain America and his harem.”

That part was true. “Don’t you need at least three women for it to count as a harem?”

“How would you know?” Carol asked. “Been researching?”

“I have no idea, but we’re never going to have three,” said Angie. “The point is, I’m not trying to take advantage of you. We’re not.”

“I know that, Ange. I know,” said Therese

“Good.” Angie left her chair, sat herself on the edge of Therese’s instead, bringing her half-finished beer with her. “Because I could use the favor, you know?”

“Why? Why me?” Therese asked, because she did not actually know.

Angie smirked. “You’ve seen Wonder Woman, right? We’re trying to get Miss Italia’s Wonder Woman outfit. Get enough from the comics that it’s hers, but not so much that we can’t get the picture released. My dear, darling spouse doesn’t want any of the usual types taking the pictures, and won’t stop bitching about it.”

“That doesn’t sound like Steve,” said Therese.

“Doesn’t, does it? See, English? They think you’re a Neanderthal too.”

“I am drawing finger pictures in the sand, with someone who speaks in spits and grunts,” Peggy replied while Jake giggled madly.

“See?” Angie said to Therese. “Neanderthal. What do you say? Think about it?”

“I,” said Therese, “Sure I’ll think about it. When would you need—”

“August,” Angie replied. “September at the latest. Depends how long it takes the costume guys to get their heads out of their asses. Honestly? It’ll probably be Ana Jarvis who makes the finished product. I’d rather it be. But apparently we’re duty-bound to give the ‘professionals’ a shot first.”

“Huh.” Therese found herself seeking out Carol’s gaze.

“What are you looking at me for?” Carol asked, lips curved at the edges.

“You haven’t said much.”

“Your professional life, those choices aren’t mine.”

“Carol’s not a Neanderthal,” said Angie. “Yay.” Angie held up her beer bottle. Carol reached for hers. They clinked them together in salute.

“No, she’s not,” said Therese, “you’re not. But I do value your opinion.”

Carol drank from the beer, shrugged in a way that didn’t match her long, elegant body. “As long as they pay you professional rates—”

“Carol,” Therese sighed.

“Of course,” said Angie. “Howard doesn’t know jack about directing a movie, this might actually be the worst thing ever,” she added cheerfully, “but it won’t fail because we ran out of money to throw at it.”

“—and I get to see copies of the work,” said Carol, “I say go for it. If you want to.”

“Didn’t Howard make a few movies in the ‘40’s?” Therese asked, only remembering because Dannie made her watch every movie he could, and summarized the ones he couldn’t.

“We don’t talk about those,” said Angie.

“We don’t?”

“We do not. We’re locking in an actual director who can fix things whenever Howard isn’t looking, or gets bored.”

“Huh,” said Therese. “Hey, stay there a sec.” The light was hitting Angie perfectly, and Therese couldn’t help herself. She reached into the bag she and Carol had packed for themselves, found the camera there.

“You’re not on the clock yet,” said Angie. “I’m not paying you for those.”

“Shut up,” Therese replied, laughing. She snapped several shots, Angie pulling some of her most dramatic of expressions. The looks meant to reach hundreds of people in a packed theater, including those in the back row.

With the camera in hand, Therese couldn’t stop herself. She took a few pictures of Steve and the girls at a distance, to add to her growing collection on those subjects. There was a lovely shot of Rindy splashing at Lizzie in the surf, the water seeming to hang in midair as Therese froze the image. Lizzie made an impressive jump in another one. She might’ve been flying, the way Angie pretended to all those times for _Peter Pan_.

After that, she moved back to closer subjects, photographing Jake and Peggy together. Jake’s unbridled delight over something so simple, Peggy’s relaxed, unguarded smile.

Therese was still clicking away when the burst of fireworks split the daytime sky.

It was not the loudness of the sound that truly caught Therese’s attention, nor the brief flare of color that came with it. She was used to working around all the unexpected distractions of New York. It was Angie’s curse word that threw her off. Angie getting up so fast from their shared chair that she knocked into Therese. Some of her beer sloshed over and hit Therese’s arm, her camera, the rest of it spilling into the sand at their feet.

The sudden cold on her skin made Therese gasp, lower the viewfinder. Her reflexive horror at anything unwanted touching her camera was quickly overtaken by the intensity of the scene in front of her. Peggy, playing happily with Jake the moment before, was now stiff as a board, her body curled around his. She had an arm around his belly, another around his chest, covering him, holding him in her lap. Jake was fussing, but it was just as likely due to being pulled from his game as it was to the way he’d been pulled.

Therese wondered why Angie wasn’t there with them, until she saw what was happening further down the beach. Unlike Peggy, Steve wasn’t even partway sitting up. He was in the sand fully, the abandoned beach ball nearby. It took Therese another second to find the girls, to realize they were hidden under Steve’s bigger frame. The muscles in his bare back stood out, even at this distance. His wet hair almost touched the sand, he was curled that tightly over the girls. Therese might not have known they were there at all if not for glimpses of Rindy’s bright yellow swimsuit.

Therese reacted without thinking. Putting the camera down with none of the necessary care, she stood, ran after Angie, who was halfway to Steve already.

“Therese,” Carol said, somewhere behind her.

Therese ignored her, some base instinct of concern for Rindy overriding anything else. She ran to catch up, noting that, bizarrely, Angie slowed down as she got closer. By the time she was within touching distance, she’d gone to almost a walk, which made it easier for Therese to close the gap. She was close enough to hear Angie say something indistinct, presumably to Steve, who was still doing whatever the hell he was doing.

Therese hadn’t processed any of it. She didn’t know what she was looking at, what she was even thinking, except that something was very wrong here. What she would’ve done about it became a question unanswered because suddenly there was an arm around her middle, causing her to stumble in the sand.

“Don’t,” Carol said, pulling her closer than was probably wise, no matter how spread out the beachgoers were.

“Rindy,” said Therese, impatient as she went to get out of Carol’s hold.

“I said don’t!”

The sharpness in her voice brought Therese up short. If that hadn’t done it, Carol’s nails pressed into her stomach, over her bathing suit would have. Not enough to hurt, but Therese felt them, felt a warning. The shock of it held Therese still as much as Carol’s arm, still in place and promising to tighten if necessary.

There was nothing to do but watch as Angie placed a hand on Steve’s back. Listen to more of those words that were mostly carried away by distance and the summer breeze. Some of them might’ve been Italian, but Therese wasn’t sure.

Angie’s hand stayed on Steve’s back until he started to relax, to unfold himself from around the girls. Rindy and Lizzie climbed out from beneath him. Rindy looked more baffled than anything else. Lizzie was worried, perhaps, but not scared. Certainly not as scared as Therese felt.

Steve was on his knees in the sand. Angie’s hand had moved from his back, was at his shoulder now, sometimes going up to skim against his cheek before returning. Angie said something to the girls. She used her free hand to brush the worst of the sand off Lizzie, then Rindy, a cursory job. She said something else to the kids and they started walking toward Therese and Carol.

Carol’s arm loosened, but didn’t drop, poised to block Therese if she tried to cut the distance.

The girls reached them soon enough. “Mama said make sure Rindy can have ice cream,” said Lizzie. “She said she’s buying.”

There was an ice cream truck parked a ways behind where they’d settled. A bit of a hike, but within sight. Carol finally dropped her arm as she answered. “That’s fine, sweetheart. Take the money from my bag, alright? Rindy, you remember which pocket?”

It was a simple question, voiced normally, but Therese saw the intensity just behind it, how thoroughly Carol was studying Rindy.

“Yes,” said Rindy. “Mommy, what happened?” She looked between Carol and Lizzie. “Was that part of the game?”

“Are you hurt, Rindy?” Carol asked.

“No,” Rindy said. “It didn’t hurt.”

“Mama said she’s buying,” said Lizzie. “She won’t like it if you do.”

“It’s your birthday, I’m treating,” said Carol. “I’ll talk to your Mama, okay?”

“She said get one for Jakey too,” Lizzie said, like that might dissuade Carol. “He never had ice cream before.”

“Well, we have to fix that, don’t we? Get one for Jake too,” Carol said, looking at Rindy. “We’ll talk later, okay baby?”

Therese thought for a moment that Rindy would argue, but she didn’t. “Okay.”

“Good girl. Just the ice cream, alright? Stay together, where we can see you.”

“We know,” said Lizzie. “Mama already said.”

Carol took a moment to brush wet hair out of Rindy’s eyes before telling them to go ahead. Therese wasn’t sure which of them the gesture was for.

As the kids moved past them, Therese’s eyes found Steve and Angie again. Steve remained on his knees in the sand. His arms were wound around Angie’s waist, his cheek pressed to her stomach. Angie’s fingers carded through Steve’s hair. She still murmured soft things. The only one Therese really caught was Angie telling him to take a deep breath, please.

Please, like a request, Angie’s voice a low hum.

Steve was shaking, his whole body wracked with spasms. He might’ve been crying. Therese wasn’t sure on that, but the possibility of it was jolting enough.

Steve Rogers knelt like that, holding his love, in such a position of supplication? That photograph would be worth more, in so many ways, than every picture she’d ever taken of him, of his family. Than every picture she’d ever taken period.

Therese, not for the first time, hated how her brain worked sometimes, how the images became more important than anything else. She hated how she reached for a camera strap that wasn’t there.

She wouldn’t have sold it. She’d give her right arm before she gave that photo to Whitmore. It wasn’t about the money, or the notoriety that would surely come with it. Therese wanted to take the photo because she wanted to take the photo. She didn’t know if that made the whole thing—her reflexive grab for the camera, her pangs of frustration at its absence—better or worse.

“Therese? Come on.”

Carol’s voice was low and gentle, with none of the reprimand Therese was giving herself. She listened to it, turned away from Steve and Angie to follow the kids back along the beach.

Longer strides meant that she and Carol caught up quickly. Therese almost wished they hadn’t. Everything with Steve and Rindy, she’d almost forgotten Peggy. Peggy who was still folded low over Jacob’s body. It hadn’t been all that long, Therese realized, since the short burst of fireworks started a chain reaction. Just a handful of seconds, really. Still, so long for Peggy to hold that position, stay just that way.

Lizzie and Rindy were stopped in front of Peggy. “Mommy?” Lizzie said, an uncharacteristic note of worry in her voice. “You okay, Mommy?”

Another couple of seconds followed before Peggy seemed to come back to herself. She sat up, looked over Jake, then up at Lizzie. “Of course, love. Are you? Rindy?”

“I’m fine,” Rindy said, with as much confusion as bravery.

“Yeah,” said Lizzie. “Mama said we could get ice cream.”

“She did, did she? Well, Mama is very, very smart. You see where Mama left her bag? Let Rindy count out the money. And don’t forget about your brother.”

“Mama said already. But Aunt Carol said take the money from her.”

“Really?” Peggy’s eyes landed on Therese and Carol. “Angie will be cross with you.”

“Oh no, whatever will I do?” Carol replied. She went to their bags, bent down a moment until she came back with change.

It was a testament to Therese’s mental state that she barely took time to admire the view. She looked back behind her, saw Steve and Angie wading in the surf, farther than he’d gone before, with the kids. Her hands were on him, helping rinse the sand from his body, it looked like. He dove beneath the waves suddenly, his head going under. He didn’t come up, not during any of the long moments Therese watched before a noise from Jake caught her attention. He’d yet to resurface when she looked back.

Angie stood back in waist-high waves, still beautiful in the sun, the salt water. Therese’s stomach fluttered, irrationally worried. She’d seen Steve float at the bottom of a pool for longer than it took Rindy to watch one of her Superman episodes. He’d been underwater for years and come out none the worse for wear.

And still, Therese worried.

* * *

Steve surfaced. Therese felt silly for being anxious about that, but not silly enough that her other concerns abated, the ones she couldn’t have voiced properly if asked. Not that anyone was rushing to talk about it.

Steve and Angie returned to the group, settled down on a pair of towels. Angie’s fingers kept drifting to Steve’s neck, his hair. Steve said something about being surprised that might’ve turned into an apology if Angie had let him finish talking. Peggy’s reaction wasn’t discussed at all.

Therese screwed up a little. She tried to be subtle about her camera, making sure the spilled beer hadn’t broken anything. It hadn’t, there wasn’t enough for that, but Angie noticed her looking, realized what happened. There was a quiet conversation, not quiet enough that Steve didn’t hear, and then he and Angie were both going on about buying her a new camera, or paying to fix that one, and it was all fairly horrible.

It ended in a stalemate when the kids came back with their ice cream. Therese managed to get a shot of Jake’s face the first time he tried the stuff. His initiation was an enormous cone of strawberry that was bigger than his head. Therese suspected this selection was made so Rindy and Lizzie could have more ice cream for themselves.

Jake was a pink, sticky mess after, and the girls weren’t much better. Peggy took a rather enormous bite of the cone Jake would never be able to eat, leaving Rindy and Lizzie with what was left. Therese snapped pictures of all of it, hoping this would dissuade anyone from purchasing a camera for her.

After, Carol took the girls back into the water, got Therese to come with. They went far enough to rinse off the sand that covered the kids, and what was left of the beer that’d landed on Therese. It was a brief excursion, without the splashing and horseplay of earlier.

Steve had retrieved the fallen beach ball the kids were playing with when he came back with Angie. It continued to be tossed around, but no one strayed far from the chairs. Steve almost passed for relaxed, lain out on the beach, letting Jake crawl all over him and press fistfuls of wet sand against his bare torso.

It wasn’t unpleasant, the rest of the day, and Therese saw the girls laugh plenty of times. She also saw Lizzie stick unusually close to Peggy and Jake, saw the glances Rindy kept sending. Mostly to Carol, but Therese too, sometimes.

It wasn’t until they were in the car on the way back to the apartment that Rindy broached the subject.

“Mommy?” she said from the backseat, over the hum of Elvis on the radio.

Carol, like Steve, had some bizarre aversion to Elvis, and would normally find any excuse to turn the music down. Or at feign annoyance while Therese turned it up. She lowered the volume this time too, but one glance told Therese she wasn’t eager to do it.

But, to her credit, Carol didn’t pretend everything was fine, like they’d done for half the day. “You want to talk now, sweetheart?” she asked.

Therese saw Rindy’s nod through the rearview mirror. “What happened to Uncle Steve?”

They hit a stop sign. Carol checked the traffic, waited a second too long to accelerate, speak again. “The fireworks scared him a little, the noise.”

“Aunt Peggy too?”

“I think so,” Carol said. “Yes.”

“They got scared of noise?” She’d kept quiet, waited for the right time to revisit her question, but was too young to hide her incredulity.

“Loud noises can be scary, when you aren’t ready for them,” Carol said. “Remember how you didn’t like the thunderstorm after Mouse went to the hospital to have your brother?”

That Carol would use Rindy’s term of affection for Lilah—one everyone except Rindy knew Carol hated—was a testament to the seriousness of the situation.

“Yeah, but they’re grownups.”

“Sometimes grownups get scared too.”

“I know that. But they’re them. Uncle Steve’s a soldier. The best one ever.”

Therese heard Steve in her head, making some kind of joke about bullshit press.

“Everyone gets scared sometimes. Even soldiers.”

“But why did he jump on us?”

Therese saw Carol’s hands tighten around the wheel, then relax.

“Sometimes,” Carol said, “when people get scared, they want to hide from the scary thing, find somewhere safe. Like you after a bad dream, when you come snuggle with one of us.”

“Or you with _The Twilight Zone_ , and how you can’t watch it without Mama?”

Therese bit her lip too late to contain her laughter. Carol gave her the longest look she could manage without crashing. “I watch that because of Mama, because she likes it. She’s the one who doesn’t want to watch without me. And you, my darling, definitely shouldn’t be watching it, ever, but yes, it’s a bit like that.”

Therese smiled, only half-tried to cover it by looking out the window. It was good to feel some of the tension go.

“Sometimes people want to hide,” said Carol, “and sometimes they want to protect others from what’s scary. That’s what soldiers are supposed to do, protect the rest of us from scary things.”

“But it was just fireworks,” said Rindy.

“I know, sweet pea. But Steve didn’t know that at first. Sometimes when people get scared, it takes them a little longer to realize what’s real and what isn’t, that they don’t have to be scared anymore. Like how it feels right after you wake up from a bad dream?” Carol made it a question, checking Rindy’s understanding, searching for a way to explain it.

Rindy nodded slowly. “The fireworks were like bad dream stuff?”

“Yes, honey. Steve…he didn’t want you or Lizzie to get hurt. Do you understand?”

“Like when the car stops all of a sudden and someone puts their arm out for you?”

“Yes, like that.”

They’d all done it, Therese suspected. Herself, Carol, Abby, Harge, probably Lilah too. Reached an instinctive arm over to Rindy when something went too close to wrong on the road, braced her instead of themselves.

Therese’s first thought on realizing this was that Rindy was very smart for making the connection. After that, Therese thought of Carol keeping her back from Steve so insistently, of Carol’s nails pressing into her skin.

She didn’t get to ask until they were home, with Rindy sent off for a quick shower. They were in the bedroom, Carol unpacking their beach bag and frowning at the number of towels that would need to be tossed in the hamper. Therese sat on the edge of the bed near her, still in her beach things.

“Carol?” Therese said, wanting her own shower but needing this more.

Carol hummed to show she was listening, busy with the bag she’d placed on their bed, atop another towel.

“Were you worried about Steve, before?”

“Sure I was.”

Therese wasn’t meant to notice, she was sure. Notice the small hesitation before the answer, the way Carol’s hands fumbled just a bit with the next item in the bag. “I meant that you, you held me back from him.”

“Angie had him,” Carol said without looking up. “If we’d rushed up too, it would’ve just overwhelmed him more, him and the girls.”

“And…what do you think would’ve happened then?”

“Sorry?”

“Carol…you were holding me back like you thought it’d be dangerous if you didn’t. Like you thought Steve was dangerous.”

“He’s Steve,” Carol said, dismissive.

“And?”

“And, if I thought he was dangerous to you, if I thought anyone was dangerous to you, they wouldn’t be near you.”

She’d been alone with Steve countless times, sat in his garage while they worked quietly on their own creative pursuits. They’d shared his old, worn sofa, sometimes pressed close together while Steve showed her his sketches. She’d fallen asleep against his shoulder once or twice after too long a night and too many beers, woken up to a gentle shake of her arm and that crooked, closed-mouth smile of his. She’d never once worried, never heard a word from Carol about it.

“And, you held me back,” Therese said slowly. “You kept me from getting near him.”

Carol’s fingers clenched around a bright blue towel. She breathed, slim, elegant shoulders rising and falling with the motion, before tossing the towel aside. “Steve isn’t dangerous,” Carol said. “But people aren’t always who they are.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” Carol picked up another towel, shook it out, “that sometimes the world gets smaller, and people are…fear makes people different. Less thinking, more instinct.”

“Instinct?”

“He protects people, that’s what he does. He was protecting the girls.”

“Carol—”

“And when you protect someone, you’re protecting them against something. A threat. Real or imagined. You were going to run up to him, grab him, shake him, whatever you were going to do.”

It took a moment for understanding to hit. When it did, it came with a half-laugh, an incredulous sound. “You think he would’ve seen me as a threat?” It was absurd. _No one_ saw her as a threat, and this was Steve. “He bench-presses motorcycles.”

“Exactly.”

Carol’s mouth was a thin line. She gave the laundry much more concentration than was warranted. “Carol—"

“Do you hear the shower running?”

The sudden change had Therese blinking. “What?”

“The shower, I don’t hear it. Little Miss I Got Clean in the Water.” Carol shook her head, looked up at Therese with a small, exasperated smile. “Would you mind finishing these, tossing them in the wash? I’m going to make sure she gets in the tub. The rate we’re going, the whole apartment will stink of salt and brine.”

“Carol…”

“Please, sweetheart?”

Therese’s stomach churned unpleasantly, making her regret the hot dogs she’d had at the beach. “Sure,” she said, standing. Crossing the few feet between them, Therese brushed her fingers against Carol’s arm. “Are you alright?”

Carol leaned in for a soft kiss. “I’m home with my girls, how could I not be?”

Carol touched the side of Therese’s face, ran a thumb over the cheekbone. Therese was left with questions and laundry, and Carol’s voice down the hall as she asked Rindy what she was doing.

* * *

“Night, Prezioso,” Angie whispered, barely an exhale as she kissed the pad of her thumb, touched it to Lizzie’s forehead.

She was risking life, limb, but mostly sanity by doing this. The excitement and the beach air had finally gotten Lizzie down for the count, but one wrong move would mean two more hours of hell. If she wasn’t very careful—Peggy crossing a field of landmines careful—she was going to be in trouble here.

The hardest part was closing Lizzie’s door in just that way so it didn’t wake her. Steve was the only one able to pull it off every time. Almost. Luck was on Angie’s side tonight, as it should be considering all that labor she’d endured five years earlier. She managed to get out of there without raising the alarm.

She’d already checked on Jake, who was far more likely to stay in dreamland after he got there. A meal and a cuddle, and he was good until his next feeding. Which Angie understood. Peggy’s breasts could be very calming, when they weren’t having the opposite effect.

Crossing the hall and entering their bedroom, Angie debated whether or not it was calm that Peggy was going for now. She lay on their bed, Steve’s bare body the only thing covering hers. He was inside of her, the movements slow, deep. The two of them kissed in the half-light from the bedside lamp. It shadowed them just enough that what Angie could see—a thin sheen of sweat on glistening muscles, impossibly gorgeous people who only looked better when they kissed each other—was that much more enticing.

Angie ran her tongue across her lips, shutting the door behind her. She took her time strolling forward, watched as Peggy’s fingers messed up Steve’s hair. Her other hand grasped at the sculpture that was Steve’s back.

“Sluts,” Angie declared, pinching Steve’s deliciously exposed ass.

The move made him jump, which brought on a similar reaction in Peggy as his angle changed mid-thrust. Angie was pleased to see the little shiver that wracked across Steve’s body. It was a neat, if unexpected trick she’d learned from Peggy, that the Boy Scout didn’t always need to be talked to like a Boy Scout.

Their kiss broken, Peggy looked over Steve’s shoulder at Angie, her curls a mussed halo against the pillow. “Why, because we didn’t wait for you?”

“Exactly.” Angie ran a finger along the bottom of Peggy’s foot, stepped back enough to avoid it when it kicked out. “All those secrets you don’t tell me, Pegs? None of it matters, because I know your tickle spots.”

“Remember that feeling of contentment and acceptance, darling, the next time you’re giving me grief about all those secrets I can’t tell you.”

“Oh, English, but I give you so much more than grief.”

Peggy smiled, an easy agreement.

“On that note,” Steve said, still buried to the hilt inside Peggy. “You coming?”

Angie couldn’t tell if the pun was intentional. It could go both ways with him, especially when his concentration was elsewhere. She waved her hand as if to brush his question away, then dragged her fingers along Peggy’s leg where it was wrapped around Steve, careful to avoid anywhere that would get her kicked in the face. “Got to get my nighttime stuff done first.” She trailed her fingers to the top of Peggy’s thigh, then jumped over to trace Steve’s spine, up the back of his neck. She stopped at his hair, tangling her fingers with Peggy’s in the blond strands. “Guess you’ll just have to wait for me.”

“Hard to get? Really?” Steve asked.

“You just take care of my girl, and make sure you can still get hard afterward.”

Angie backed off then, nightgown flowing behind her as she entered their bathroom, sat down at the vanity. She spent a few minutes washing her face, then squinted in the mirror at the view it provided, or lack of one. “Guys?” Angie called over the slight squeaking of bedsprings.

The squeaking stopped. “Yes, dear?” Steve asked.

“Could you move it over to the left. No, sorry, my left.”

Angie had every intention of completing her nightly routine like a proper lady, and of being entertained while she did it.

With some talk of voyeurs who refused to participate, her spouses complied, and then promptly resumed their sex.

Angie picked up her hairbrush and smiled to herself as she watched the rise and fall of their bodies. They whined, but they liked it better when she watched, and so did she. And she needed to watch them now, almost as much as they needed her to.

July Fourth had been a nightmare of a date ever since she and Peggy started dating. First it was a day of ghosts and losses, Steve gone and Peggy going to a place Angie couldn’t follow. The disdain for fireworks was always there, but for a few years the sounds and tastes and smells of the real world, the ones that bothered Peggy so much during those couple of weeks before, on, and after the Fourth, none of those things mattered as much as what wasn’t here. Who wasn’t here.

And then Steve came back.

His first birthday after being pulled from the ocean was one Angie tried hard to forget. The fanfare reached a level of madness not seen since he was unveiled to the world back in ‘43. Angie had planned to pull some enjoyment out of the occasion—Steve and Peggy both deserved that much—and instead spent her night holding Peggy while Peggy cradled Steve, both of them crying, shaking.

Angie considered it the worst of the worst of the Fourths. The only good things to be said were that Steve was there, alive and that the subsequent birthdays weren’t quite as bad.

With Steve back, the things that Peggy hated most about the holiday changed. The biggest ghost of all was no more, which left room for so many other ones to take his place. The nightmares Peggy couldn’t share with Angie, Angie could see reflected in Steve’s eyes.

Angie loved Lizzie with everything she had, wouldn’t trade a day of her life, not for anything. Yet part of her still wished their little miracle had come along a month earlier or later, didn’t have to celebrate the beginning of her life amidst all those ghosts. She thanked God, every single year, that father and daughter hadn’t wound up sharing a birthday. Back when she was pregnant (and swollen and sweaty and sore), she’d thought it wouldn’t be so bad, might serve as a much-needed bright spot that would help Peggy and Steve both. She’d been wrong, she knew that now. There was too much pressure as it was. Pressure to perform for the adoring, rabid public, and, so much more importantly, for Lizzie.

The thing about pressure was that it needed relief, one way or another. Seeing ghosts made you desperate to feel alive, And so, the sex. Again.

Angie made herself go through her routine without rushing. Peggy and Steve were going slow tonight, so she would too. She’d be patient and she’d make them be patient too, because they were here, together and safe, not in a warzone anymore. They had time.

So Angie took it. She brushed her hair and her teeth—she’d likely be doing filthy things with her mouth very soon—and waited until they were both close. She got the vanity back in order, shut the light off behind her when she left the bathroom. She walked leisurely around the bed, settling herself over the covers on one side, giving them plenty of space on the other.

She’d been looking from the other side when she first came in. She’d watched Peggy’s thighs and calves strain themselves against Steve’s body, as they did now, but the angle was different. She had a better view of Peggy’s other leg now, the one with the bruise that’d peeked out from beneath Peggy’s shorts earlier. It was easier to see the fingermarks there without fabric in the way. Strong muscles worked themselves underneath the bruised patch of skin. Angie thought about touching it with the pads of her fingers, but stayed still, simply watching what so many people in this asshole, ungrateful country wished they could.

Fuck it. Maybe they’d go and visit Peggy’s family next year, skip all this stress and bullshit. Assuming Peggy decided that the stress and bullshit of her family was preferable, and that they figured out how to put Lizzie on a ship for days and days without causing everyone else to jump overboard.

So, they weren’t going anywhere.

Her spouses, however, were coming, and that was a treat to behold no matter the circumstances.

Steve’s breathing was labored, not an easy thing to accomplish. He nuzzled his face against Peggy’s as she let a series of low gasps fill the room. Angie moved to lay on her side, propped up on her elbow to get a better view. She never knew quite where to look with them when she was just looking, when she had the brain power to really consider it. Their faces were exquisite, watching them change in those final moments, watching how they looked at each other at their peak. Their bodies were just as appealing, the way they moved together, the twitches and shudders that wracked through these people who were usually so unflappable.

It was a feast for the eyes, an embarrassment of riches, impossible for Angie to take in every detail the way she’d like. If they made less time for each other, less time for this, Angie might’ve felt like she was missing out. Fortunately, neither Peggy or Steve would ever let that happen.

They rocked together, muffling their sounds into each other’s mouths, skin. Finishing together was hardly mandatory (Angie found it very impossible with previous partners), but Peg and Steve managed it close enough, as in sync as they always were during their best moments.

On another night, Angie would’ve clapped.

Ragged breathing began to even out fast enough to make Angie jealous. A few more soft kisses, and then Steve eased out of Peggy. They both groaned. Steve moved, rolled to lay on Peggy’s other side, further exposing her body to Angie’s gaze.

Even in the semi-dark, the bruises stood out. Below her breasts, down her ribcage, her stomach, an ugly mess of color. The red of fading scratches, the blues and yellows of skin in various stages of healing. From just under her tits to the top of her thighs, Peggy looked like she’d gone ten rounds with a heavyweight champ. Or a genetically enhanced super soldier. Her ass, which Angie unfortunately could not see right now, bore the indents of Steve’s fingers. None of it anywhere that clothes couldn’t hide. Summer clothes, since this time of year sucked enough for Peggy without the added sweat and hassle of clothes that concealed. The marks were all over her skin, but only very specific parts of it.

Except for that handprint on her thigh, the one Therese had seen part of at the beach.

Peggy, beautifully disheveled, nosed at Angie’s shoulder, kissed it. “Took you long enough.”

“Someone was eager,” Angie replied. “Or someones,” she amended. “Which one of you exhibitionists decided to leave the door hanging wide open, with all your stuff hanging out? I could’ve been anybody,” she said, teasing because they probably needed her to. “Could’ve been a stranger, a crazed fan. Lizzie.”

Steve settled his head against Peggy’s breast, laid one arm over her. He closed his eyes as Peggy reached a hand up to hold him in place, run her fingers through his hair. “I’m listening,” he said, sounding deceptively close to falling asleep, his eyes closed against Peggy’s ministrations. “Couldn’t be any of those people, because I’m listening.”

“’Course you were, baby, of course you were.” Angie made sure he could hear the smirk in her voice, noting the beginnings of a fresh hickey on Peggy’s neck, bruises on her collarbones. “Never misses a trick, this one.”

“Dancing monkey,” he said on a yawn. “I know all the tricks.”

“Mmm. Right. Sure.”

“I’d hear anything our darling monkey missed,” Peggy said in a voice too tender for such a sarcastic remark.

“Yeah? You got super hearing now too, Pegs?” Angie went to kiss her, but missed, her mouth and nose bumping into Peggy’s cheek instead, finding the remnants of tear tracks.

“Absolutely. And you have terrible aim.” Peggy kissed her, soft but insistent, gently tilting Angie’s neck to get a better angle.

“My mistake,” said Angie, a sigh into Peggy’s mouth as she hooked her leg over Peggy’s. They kissed and petted lazily for a few minutes, Angie absently taking Steve’s hand when it brushed against her hip. “Talked to Ma. Did either of your super ears catch that?”

“I made sure not to,” said Steve.

“Her and Papa are going to stop by in the morning, grab the little devils.”

“Are Nonna and Nonno planning on taking them to church?” Peggy asked. “Because that’s not going to do anything to fix the devil bits.”

“She said something about the zoo.”

“Brooklyn, or Central Park?” Steve asked.

“Brooklyn boy. Does your obsessive loyalty extend to which zoo our kids visit?” Angie asked

“One means they’ll be gone longer,” he replied.

"It's my mother. She's got a ragu going. We won't see them until after dinner tomorrow night either way. Plenty of time,” she added, and felt Peggy’s body grow more relaxed next to hers.

“Plenty of time,” Peggy echoed, pressing more kisses to Angie’s mouth.

“For whatever we want to,” said Angie, pushing some of Peggy’s curls back from her face.

“Mmm. So very many possibilities there.”

Angie darted her tongue against Peggy lips until they opened for her. She reached down, finding the breast Steve wasn’t currently using as a pillow. The unbruised skin there stood out in its perfection. Angie circled Peggy’s nipple, feeling the extra weight in her hands, knowing why this place had been spared the rougher treatment of other areas.

Peggy let out a breathy sigh. “Darling,” she said, petting her fingers over Steve’s cheek, his ear, “you’ll need to find somewhere else to lay your head, I’m afraid.”

“Not fair,” he said, lifting his head only enough to lay a similar trail with his mouth to the one Angie had with her fingers.

“Down boy,” said Angie, reaching for Peggy’s other breast. “You can damn well share.”

“Can’t,” he said, first nipping at her fingers, then sucking two of them into his mouth.

“Can and will,” Angie said, enjoying the warm suction of Steve’s mouth, his tongue playing against her fingertips.

“Enough,” said Peggy, shoving lightly on Steve’s arm. “I am not a prize to be fought over.”

“You are a prize, though,” Steve replied. Conceding, he moved himself back from Peggy, enough for her to do as she liked, but still in easy reach of his long arms.

“Damn right,” Angie said, “and I win.”

“Yes, yes, long live the queen,” said Peggy, voice dripping with that dry Brit humor her people came out of the womb with.

Angie frowned, bumping her nose against Peggy’s. “Screw the Queen. Don’t go bringing up your exes now.”

“She was only a princess then,” Steve protested.

“Only,” Angie repeated, fully invested in the game, in drawing them both out. “You two were such sluts during the war, I swear.”

“All good soldiers were sluts during the war,” said Peggy.

“The bad ones were too,” said Steve.

Peggy sat back against the pillows. “Come here and claim your throne, woman.”

Angie hesitated. “This was supposed to be about you.”

“Is it not about me, and what I want?” Peggy’s eyes flashed with something dark, but not cold. “Because what I want right now is you, up, and that off.”

She’d left the nightgown on. Why the hell had Angie done that again? Probably so Peggy would do exactly what she’d just done and order her to take it off. “Do as Peggy says?”

“If you’re smart. On your knees, darling.”

“If you don’t take her up on that, I will,” said Steve, though he was already moving to help rid Angie of the nightgown.

“You wish,” said Angie as Peggy slid down the bed and she moved up. Steve, always the gentlemen, grabbed one of the pillows, put it beneath Peggy’s head. Then he helped Angie settle into position over her. Angie kissed him in reward, giggling at the taste that came with it. “Latte, Soldato?”

“You’ve never minded before,” he replied, palming Angie’s breast, tugging lightly until it stiffened under his fingers.

“Suppose I didn’t.” Angie sighed as Steve’s hand skimmed down her ribcage, stopping at her hip to help steady her. Peggy’s hands came up to cup her ass, squeezing. Angie looked down at Peggy’s mussed curls, at that mouth so close, the eyes staring intently at Angie’s most intimate places. “Hi,” Angie said, bracing one hand on the headboard.

“Hi,” Peggy said, then pulled Angie further down.

The first touches were light. Peggy’s nose bumped against her with such softness from someone who’d all but demanded Angie be here, like this. Not that Angie minded. No, she didn’t mind at all, sighing as Peggy’s tongue made warm, wide circles, but not where they were most needed.

She could’ve begged already, after watching what she had earlier. She wouldn’t, though. Peggy needed to set the pace, be in control. That was more important than Angie’s beautiful suffering.

Suffering Steve seemed intent on distracting her from. Or adding to. He tilted Angie’s jaw enough to catch her in a kiss, the faint taste of milk still on his breath. Angie moved the hand not holding the headboard to his bare thigh, letting her nails dig in.

He kissed her until she almost couldn’t kiss him back, making Angie wonder, not for the first time, at the former asthmatic who sometimes seemed like he hardly needed to breathe at all. He leaned his head into her neck, her shoulder, and Angie held him there, moving her hand up from his leg to hook back against his neck. She rocked softly into Peggy’s mouth, her sounds let out against Steve’s cheek where he knelt next to her on the bed.

A few hours ago, it was Steve whimpering. Sobbing into Angie’s belly, knees pressed into the sand while Angie stroked his hair, his shoulders, used both her languages to murmur every reassurance she could think of.

Angie made herself stop thinking of that. He wouldn’t want her to. Neither would. “Neck,” she said, knowing he’d feel the vibrations in her throat. “My neck, Steve.”

Steve hummed his understanding into just that place, then kissed her there, his lips joining Peggy’s in driving Angie crazy. His teeth were there, but light, careful.

“Nice,” Angie sighed, letting go of the headboard to lean more fully into his arms. “That’s real nice, baby.”

Steve hummed again, his tongue darting out against her pulse point. Adjusting his hold, he cupped a breast in each hand, squeezing and circling while Angie’s legs tightened involuntarily around Peggy.

Peggy’s grip shifted too, from Angie’s ass to her hips. Her nails, shorter than she’d keep them if she weren’t with Angie, still dug into Angie’s skin, sending pinpricks across her heightened nerves.

Angie reached down, tapped her thumb against Peggy’s. The pain instantly stopped. Angie closed her eyes, exhaled her relief, but she could feel Peggy watching her. Opening her eyes, she rubbed Peggy’s thumb again to show everything was okay.

Inspiration combined with need very suddenly. One arm still hooked around Steve’s neck, holding him on hers, Angie reached back with the other hand, her fingers landing in the soft, short hair between Peggy’s legs. “Help me out here, Steve.”

Steve was blessedly quick on the uptake. Releasing one of Angie’s breasts with a final tweak of his fingers, he took Angie’s hand, helped guide it to the right place. He still kissed Angie’s neck, still lavished attention on the other breast.

Angie smiled as she walked her fingers along the same places Peggy was exploring on her. Peggy was wet, still coated with the evidence of what she did with Steve. Angie found Peggy’s clit and worked it between her fingers, ones Steve still covered with his own.

“Bloody…goddamn it,” Peggy swore, her body jumping with the contact.

Angie whined at the sudden stop of Peggy’s tongue, while taking no small amount of pride in it. She’d surprised Peggy, not an easy feat. The lack of stimulation, however temporary Angie knew it to be, wasn’t great, so Angie let go of Steve’s neck, freeing up one hand to touch her breast, the one Steve had to abandon to help her.

His breath against her throat came out in something close to a growl. The noise had Angie pushing shamelessly into Peggy’s face. Peggy recovered quickly, her lips finding Angie’s clit again.

The angle wasn’t Angie’s favorite, not when it came to reciprocating, but they made it work, her and Steve. His fingers kept up the pace whenever hers faltered. Angie tried to find a rhythm, match it to Peggy’s, then she stopped trying. It’d hardly been a perfect day, and this didn’t need to be perfect either.

Peggy came before Angie did, already worked up from Steve. Angie felt the tremble of it beneath her. There was hardly any sound this time, and Angie found herself yearning for tomorrow, when the kids would be gone. Not that the muffled moan into Angie’s most sensitive place was anything to complain about.

Angie let Steve handle the aftershocks, guide their fingers to bring Peggy down,. Dropping her hand from around his neck, she brought it down near Peggy’s on her hip. She rubbed her thumb over Peggy’s, sighing out a rough breath as Peggy’s nose bumped against her clit. “Beautiful,” Angie said on another exhale. “God you’re beautiful, Peg.”

Peggy lapped her tongue against Angie’s clit faster, in tighter circles.

Cursing in Italian, Angie felt Steve move the arm around her waist so it rested lightly over her neck, her collarbones. She turned her head to kiss him, turned it again to hide her face in the muscle of his arm. His mouth went back to her neck. His teeth bit in, just hard enough.

Angie rocked herself into Peggy’s face with abandon. She moved her hand from Peggy’s mound, using it to clutch onto Steve as she rode through her orgasm.

When she started to come back, Angie found herself cradled in Steve’s arms while he pressed small kisses everywhere, her cheeks, her neck, her shoulders. He took the hand she’d used to get Peggy off, sucked two fingers into his mouth.

Below, Peggy was ghosting her tongue against Angie’s folds, always staying just far enough from something that could be too much. A murmur into Steve’s chest and he helped Angie down from what Peggy had called (with justifiable arrogance) a throne. She sank sideways, curling into Steve’s body, feeling how much he’d enjoyed the display.

Peggy moved with her usual grace as soon as she could, sliding smoothly up the bed until she was eye-level with Angie. Peggy kissed her, open mouthed and intent. Angie tasted herself all over that mouth, and it made her shiver.

She pulled back enough to bump noses with Peggy. The scent of sex was everywhere, and Angie wondered, as she sometimes did, how much stronger it was for Steve. If he had complaints, he’d never voiced them.

Angie let herself fall forward, into Peggy. Breath still uneven, she kissed along Peggy’s collarbone, tasting the sweat on her skin. Angie held Peggy to her, Peggy’s bruise-darkened body pressed to hers. Steve was still sat up on the bed, on his knees, somewhere above her. There were hands all over her, mouths soothing frenzied nerves. Angie was usually good about telling who was doing what, but didn’t have the energy for it now. They were both there, loving her. The rest was just details.

When her body had settled into a boneless, post-coital haze, Angie felt a mouth at her ear, kissing the shell of it. “You’d better not be dozing on me,” Peggy said, somewhere between threatening and teasing.

Angie hummed, dragging her eyes open. “Nuh-uh,” she said, turning her face into the column of Peggy’s throat. “Right here.”

“Good,” Peggy said, and it was definitely Peggy’s hand this time that ran from the top of Angie’s spine to just above her ass. “I do expect an encore.”

“You think you’re the only one?” she asked as Steve moved on the bed. The tip of his erection touched her leg as he settled next to her. “Slut,” she told him, making sure to watch his face as she did.

“You want me to be sorry?” he asked, his hands already on the move, ready to work her up again.

“No.” She kissed him, reached for his dick. “That’s not what I want at all”

He didn’t need to be sorry. He didn’t need to be anything with her. Neither did Peggy. For now, it was just them. Angie, and these two people who each took care of the world. While she could, while they’d let her, Angie would take care of them.

* * *

Therese’s questions weren’t answered. By the time Rindy was clean and fed and sleeping, Carol was claiming exhaustion too. It wasn’t a lie; Therese could see that. It might’ve been a tiredness with some advantages to it, and Carol might’ve feigned sleep a minute or two before actually finding it. Therese was tired too, tried to focus on that instead of the thoughts churning around in her head like the waves at the beach.

In daylight, with rest, Saturday’s mysteries didn’t seem as important. Most things were less important on Sundays. Sundays were about Rindy, making the best of their last day with her, though Harge had become less rigid in the summer months, only grumbled a little about them taking Rindy to Lizzie’s party outside of their normal schedule.

However, he never gave them too much. He claimed he needed Rindy back Sunday morning instead of their usual later pickup time, offering a vague excuse Therese didn’t believe in at all. Carol agreed with her and Therese called him petty. Carol agreed with that too, but said that if he wanted to drag himself out of bed early on a Sunday morning, that was his stupidity, pointing out that they hadn’t lost any time, accounting for the holiday. Not losing time was the best they could hope for with Harge.

The early sendoff meant earlier breakfast, rushing around, and a guarantee that Steve wasn’t on Therese’s mind that morning.

When Harge came to get Rindy, Therese was in the living room. She used to hide away or find reasons to be gone, but she’d moved past that. This was her home with Carol, not his.

Just past nine in the morning, Therese was helping Carol get Rindy ready to leave. Which meant that she and Carol were doing the last-minute checks, making sure Rindy had all her schoolwork and everything else she’d need for the next week while Rindy chattered on to Harge and did little to assist in the effort.

“Rindy, where’s your art book? Didn’t you leave it here last time?” Carol asked, eyes darting around the room, searching.

She had, and it’d led to a semi-crisis, and several calls between Harge and Carol that Therese could’ve gone without hearing.

“I don’t know,” Rindy said with a shrug and no concern at all.

Carol muttered something and went down the hall towards Rindy’s room.

Therese, busy tucking a little bag of seashells they’d collected at the beach into Rindy’s bag, glanced up from the task, at Harge. She expected to see judgment and irritation on his face. Those were the common features if she or Carol were ever the slightest bit unprepared, if they took a second too long to say goodbye. She was surprised to see his lips turned up at the edges, eyes amused as they rested on Rindy.

“You should keep better track of your things,” he said, without heat. “You’re too big to be having Mommy do it all the time.”

Therese remembered Carol saying how Rindy was losing things more and more at Harge’s house, probably for attention, making up for what the baby was taking away. She wondered if it was becoming habit, if Rindy had forgotten that there wasn’t an infant to compete with here.

“Jake wanted to eat sand,” said Rindy, scrunching her face in disgust. “Sascha won’t do that, will he?”

“I don’t know, sweet pea. It’ll be awhile before we can take him to the beach and find out.”

“Eating sand is gross.”

“Yes, it is,” Harge said. “But you had fun otherwise?”

“Yeah,” Rindy said, but the syllable was long and drawn out.

Therese turned away from the bag. Even before Rindy, when Therese hadn’t had much experience with children since she was one herself, she would’ve seen the lie.

Harge, who was an attentive father if nothing else, spotted it instantly. “But?” he said, gentle in a way that always surprised Therese when she heard it. There was an undercurrent of something else too, something she was much more familiar with.

“Did you know soldiers get scared sometimes?” Rindy asked.

“Do they?”

Harge’s voice was calm, controlled, but Therese felt the air change in the room, the threat of an oncoming storm.

“Sometimes,” Rindy said. “Uncle Steve got scared.”

“Did he? What happened?’

“He tackled me and Lizzie.”

Therese swore she saw lightning out of the corner of her eye, the precursor to an explosion of noise, followed by a raging downpour. She saw Harge’s posture change, saw him struggling to remain the person Rindy knew and not become the one she and Carol did.

“He tackled you?”

It wasn’t what happened, and it wasn’t Rindy’s fault she didn’t have a better way of phrasing it. That truth didn’t stop Therese’s gut from twisting in on itself.

“Yeah, but it didn’t hurt,” said Rindy. “I just got scared for a minute. But Uncle Steve got scared for longer because soldiers get scared too sometimes.”

“He tackled you.”

“There were fireworks, Harge. On the beach.”

Despite wanting to, Therese couldn’t find the ability to speak. It was Carol who had. She was there very suddenly, it seemed, holding a bright green book filled with plain white paper. The cover was an art project all its own, with miniature drawings covering most of its space. Rindy’s name was on it, her earliest attempts at cursive. Therese had helped her with the letters.

Carol held the book now in what looked like a relaxed grip, but her eyes were sharp on Harge’s. “Fireworks, Harge. On the _beach_.”

Therese didn’t understand the emphasis on the last word, or why Carol was repeating herself. She understood what followed even less.

Harge took a half-step back, went pale. He tensed up with something that wasn’t anger and Therese couldn’t make heads or tails of it. He and Carol were eyeing each other in a way that made Therese feel like an intruder in her own home.

“Carol,” said Harge.

She’d heard that name a thousand times, said it twice as much. She’d been hurt, angered, occasionally even jealous by the ways she’d heard Harge say it over the years.

Therese hadn’t ever heard him say it like that.

“Lizzie wanted to go,” Carol said. “She’s five.”

“Oh.”

Therese was vaguely aware of Rindy putting her shoes on, something they’d told her to do twenty minutes prior. She told Harge that Uncle Steve was okay now.

Therese doubted Harge heard Rindy at all. She wasn’t sure Carol had either, until Carol told her to come get her drawings, asked for a hug.

Carol embraced Rindy and kissed her, called her darling. Told her not to forget about Mama. Harge didn’t react to Therese’s title, the one he hated. As she hugged Rindy goodbye, Therese couldn’t help looking over Rindy’s shoulder at what was going on between Carol and Harge.

Harge told Rindy to wait for him in the hall, to stay near the door, and Rindy promised to call Carol tomorrow. Then she was gone, and it was just the three of them.

It felt like the two of them, and Therese.

“He didn’t hurt them, Harge,” Carol said. Then, for no reason Therese could think of, she grimaced.

Harge took another half-step back. “No. He wouldn’t, would he. Not Rogers.”

“Don’t do this,” Carol said, but gently, more gently than Therese had ever heard her speak to him.

“What about you?” Harge asked. “You’re, you’re okay?”

“Yes, Harge, I’m okay.”

He nodded stiffly. “Beach day, now. It was a foolish idea, if…”

“It was his little girl’s birthday,” Carol said, still softer than Therese expected. Or liked. “You would’ve done the same.”

“You think so?”

Carol exhaled a long breath. “Don’t do this,” Carol repeated. “Please.”

Harge looked around the room with the air of someone not seeing any of it before his gaze returned to Carol. “Rindy’s talking about visiting your shop for the day. Has she said?”

“She mentioned something. She’s the best help I have.”

Harge made a noise at the back of his throat. “Clearly. Your other option is Gerhard.”

“I told her we’d see about it. It’s harder on weekends.”

Harge stuffed his hands in his pockets, the gesture making him look much younger than he was. “School’s out,” he said, finding something very interesting on his perfectly shined left shoe, judging by how he stared at it. “There’s no reason she couldn’t visit during the week.”

“Isn’t there?” Carol asked.

“School’s out,” he repeated, looking back up at Carol. “If you feel like managing her on a workday.”

Rindy was, from what Therese knew, a huge distraction to both Carol and Abby when she visited the furniture shop. Neither of them cared enough to do anything about it, swearing Rindy made up for it by being the most adorably effective salesperson in the world.

“I’d like that.”

“I’ll talk to Lilah, call you next week?”

“Sure. Thank you.”

He nodded again. “I should go.”

He turned, saw Therese as though he was seeing her for the first time. He didn’t hold her gaze. Carol walked him to the door, said his name before he could leave.

“Take care,” Carol said.

Therese wasn’t sure she’d ever heard Carol say those words to him. For a long time, they barely spoke when he left. Eventually it progressed to a semi-cordial “goodbye,” or a “see you next week,” but even that level of civility wasn’t guaranteed.

Take care, Carol said, after all the times she talked about having Peggy murder him.

Harge looked like he was going to speak, but stayed silent. Therese could count on one hand the times she’d seen him let Carol have the last word. He nodded as he turned the knob.

Carol locked the door behind him. She braced a hand on it when she finished, leaning into it like she sometimes did after he left.

“Carol?”

Carol turned. She looked tired all over, but she smiled at Therese. “Well, that’s that. Thank God.”

“What was it?” Therese asked. Her own living room felt terribly unfamiliar right now.

Waving a hand, Carol crossed to the sofa, picked up a throw pillow that’d fallen from its place. “Harge,” she said, fluffing the pillow, placing it just so. “Has to make such a production out of everything.”

“But he didn’t. He stopped.”

Carol adjusted the pillow.

“Carol.”

Carol turned, navigated between the couch and the coffee table to stand in front of Therese. “What, Therese?”

“Why did he do that, with Rindy?”

Carol took Therese’s hand, tracing her thumb along the back of it and studying the invisible lines she made. “Because Rindy’s the only currency he has with me anymore, and he knows it. Keeping her away is his only means of hurting me.”

Therese figured that out about five minutes after meeting Harge. “But he said she could stay.”

“She’s his only means of hurting me, and his only means of soothing his conscience,” Carol said, quieter than she needed to.

“I don’t understand.”

“I know.” Lifting her gaze from Therese’s hand, Carol turned her head to look at a wall clock that hung next to one of Therese’s photographs. “Abby had a working dinner last night. I should see how it went.

“It’s barely past nine, she won’t be up for hours.”

“Yes well, if we have to suffer, so should she.”

‘Carol,” said Therese, not sure if she was giving a warning or making a plea.

Carol brought Therese’s hand to her mouth, kissed the palm. “I just need time, alright? Just a little. Please don’t be angry.”

“I’m not.” Therese didn’t know what she was, but it wasn’t that. “Are you okay?”

“Yes. Mostly. I will be.”

Not the most reassuring of answers, any of them. “Are we okay?”

“Oh God.” Carol kissed Therese, one hand moving to her shoulder, the other her cheek. It was an odd mix of tenderness and intensity. “Yes,” Carol said after, nuzzling her face against Therese’s, her chin bumping against Therese’s temple. “Yes. It’s old wounds, that’s all, nothing to do with you.”

Therese pulled away enough to look at Carol. “Yours or his?”

‘Ours,” Carol said after a moment. “Some wounds are shared, and it makes them much harder to close.”

* * *

Therese took a long shower. She’d skipped it earlier, because they were in a rush, and she wasn’t going to go out of her way to look good for Harge Aird. When she finished, she couldn’t hear Carol talking, which was a relief. She didn’t want to hear Carol telling Abby something—something she’d probably told Abby a hundred times—that she had so much trouble telling Therese.

She toweled off, put on a robe, sat down on the stool facing the vanity. The left side of the counter, Carol’s side, was lined with her perfumes, her makeup. Therese touched Carol’s mascara wand, thought of how carefully Carol used it every day, how it highlighted the beauty in her eyes that much more.

She thought of Carol’s eyes while she was talking to Harge, having their half-silent conversation. Therese might as well have been invisible throughout, for all the attention they paid her.

Therese put down the mascara wand and took up a brush, running it through her hair.

She did this for a few minutes before hearing the knock. Then came the sound of a door on its hinges. Seconds later, Carol approached from behind, visible through the mirror over the counter. She stopped just behind Therese, didn’t reach out to touch her.

“You don’t have to knock,” Therese said, slowly dragging the brush through her hair.

“It was closed,” Carol said, voice soft as she studied Therese through the glass.

“You don’t have to knock.”

Carol squeezed both of Therese’s shoulders. She danced her fingertips over to the base of Therese’s neck, rubbed there. Therese lowered her head at the ministrations so that her chin pointed toward her chest. Before she knew what was happening Carol had eased the brush out of her hand, taken up the job herself.

Therese let her, raising her head so she could watch Carol’s movements. Carol was much better, more careful and thorough about this than Therese would ever be. The light pressure on her scalp, on the muscles of her neck where Carol’s other hand still lingered, would have her falling asleep sitting up on a different day.

“I thought you might want some privacy,” Therese said into the quiet. She moved her hands to her lap, fidgeted with them under the counter.

“I don’t need privacy from you,” said Carol, working the brush over a small knot. “We only talked about dinner.”

Therese saw her own frown through the glass. “Oh,” she said, because she didn’t have anything better. “How was dinner?”

“Fine. The customer’s going to call us tomorrow, or Tuesday.”

“How was Abby?”

Carol’s lips twitched. “Grumpy at being asked about dinner so early.”

“I told you she would be.”

“You did.” Carol put the brush down, replacing it with her fingers. “Abby doesn’t know, about Harge.”

“Sorry?”

“That. Earlier Abby doesn’t know.” Carol’s fingers played with the ends of Therese’s hair. “I wasn’t out there having the conversation you want to have with her. I’ve never had that conversation with her.”

“You have every conversation with her.”

“Not this one.”

“Why?”

Carol sighed. She kissed Therese’s hair, then eased her fingers from it, turning from the mirror as if to leave.

“Carol?” Therese asked. She moved to follow, but Carol’s hand touched her thigh, applied the lightest of pressure. Therese stilled, let Carol go. It was a short trip. All Carol did was grab the matching stool from her side of the counter, something she’d insisted on after the first week of them bumping into each other in the mornings.

Carol pushed the stool across tile, stopped when it was in front of Therese. Sitting down, Carol put one hand back on Therese’s thigh, while the other returned to Therese’s hair, tucking strands behind her ear. Carol smoothed it into place, parting the bangs at Therese’s temple. The pads of her fingers pressed lightly into Therese’s scalp, circular motions just above her hairline. She kissed Therese’s forehead.

Therese almost said her name again, asked another question, but doing so felt wrong, like something fragile might break if she did.

Carol’s hand trailed lower, ghosting down from Therese’s forehead to the bridge of her nose. Therese tried not to fidget or giggle at the featherlight touches, didn’t entirely succeed. Carol’s fingers found her lips, her chin, down the side of her neck. Sometimes Carol followed touch with kisses, light tickles of Carol’s mouth that chased after her fingers.

From her neck, Carol’s hand moved down Therese’s arm, until their hands joined, fingers folding into each other. Carol brought them to her lips, kissed Therese’s knuckles, breathing a sigh out against them. Then she raised their fingers further, guiding them somewhere else.

Baffled, Therese found herself touching Carol’s forehead, just above her hairline. Carol adjusted the positions of their hands a little, her eyes glued to Therese’s. “Do you see?”

Therese shook her head. All she saw were Carol’s eyes so near to hers, Carol’s lips pulled into a small, sad smile. Then Therese felt it. Something different about the place on Carol’s scalp that Therese’s fingers were exploring.

Carol let go, guiding Therese’s hand back to her lap. Carol’s thumb rubbed circles into the pulse at Therese’s wrist. Her other hand still rested on Therese’s thigh, the fingers running up and down in a way that was more restless than flirtatious.

“There were fireworks on Memorial Day,” Carol said. “Ten…no. Eleven years ago now. Jesus.” Carol chuckled like she did when she wasn’t really laughing.

Therese bit her lip to keep from prodding, pushing too hard in her urgency to find out where Carol was right now. Carol was here, stroking the inside of Therese’s wrist and the outside of her leg, but Carol wasn’t only here.

“We went down South to visit my family. We knew if we stayed up here we'd have to go to the summer beach house with Harge’s parents, and that just wouldn’t do. He was fresh off of years of hell in the Pacific. Beaches and sand, and things he wouldn’t talk about. Or couldn’t. We were young, and desperate to avoid the extended Aird clan. Lesser of two evils, we thought, which at the time meant my family. My older sister, her newest baby, and the renovations my brother-in-law’s latest promotion paid for. Elaine practically demanded to host that year, and no one was really arguing. So, lesser of two evils, we went South with the rest of my family not thinking about how going to Virginia meant going to Virginia.

  
“Elaine was far enough inland that there wouldn’t be any beach trips, but that hardly helped because it was hot as hell, and so humid my hair was curling. And everyone and their brother-in-law, including mine, had a barbecue or a smoker going. You wouldn’t believe how thick the air was, smell of charred meat everywhere. And when my family has themselves a feast, it’ll damn well be the biggest and best in the state. So of course, they made Harge help haul an enormous dead pig to put over the coals.”

There was too much wrong there for Therese to even begin to deal with, so she picked the most glaring part of the image. “ _Harge_ carried a dead pig?” Therese wasn’t sure she’d ever seen the man out of a suit.

Carol smiled, tight at the edges. “He wasn’t pleased about it, but he’d done other things by then, things that pleased him even less.”

“Things?”

“Storming beaches,” Carol said. “As far as I know, he never used a sword. Anyway. He was already on edge. So was I.”

Carol seemed to drift farther away. Therese squeezed her hand. Carol squeezed back, gave her what Therese suspected was the best smile she could manage right now.

“I told Harge to go back to the guesthouse. Have a mint julep, turn the fan on, try to cool off. I remember I had my hand on his chest, gave him this pretend shove to get him moving in that direction, out of the chaos. His heart was racing like mad.

“So, I held the line, mingled. I don’t know for how long, but I spent every minute of it thinking about the shower I absolutely could not wait for. Harge was half-asleep when I came into the guesthouse to tell him he was missed, that we were being summoned. I put my hand on his back to wake him, and as I did, my asinine cousins who were just outside set off fireworks scaring the hell out of everyone within miles, and terrifying my husband, who'd only been back from war a few months.”

“Oh God.” The pieces—all of them, not just this morning’s—were coming together, forming a picture Therese didn’t like at all.

Carol was the one to squeeze her hand this time. “He didn’t mean any of it,” Carol said, much calmer than Therese felt. “He didn’t mean to strike me, he didn’t mean to shove me back, away from him.”

“Carol…”

“He didn’t mean for me to hit my head on some terribly placed baseboard heater. But he did those things, and I hit my head. Because he was exhausted, and wound tighter than a tin toy, with all the smoke and charred meat in the air, and fireworks going off like goddamn bullets."

Therese swore that she could smell the meat, the smoke. That had to be why she could taste bile in her mouth. “Carol,” she said, wanting to reach for her but unsure if she should. She both wanted and didn’t want to find that place on Carol’s scalp again. She couldn’t understand how she’d missed it all these years.

“It’s alright,” Carol said. “It is. Okay? A few stitches, and that was that.”

“But it’s not,” Therese said, trying hard not to cry. “It wasn’t.”

“No, it wasn’t. He never stopped apologizing for it.”

“He,” Therese swallowed. “All the things he’s done to you, and that’s the only one he’s sorry for?”

“He’s Harge,” Carol said. “For all our problems, our fights, he never hit me. Not intentionally. It was a point of pride with him.”

“I saw him grab you and try to drag you around the first night I met him.”

“He’s Harge,” Carol said again. "He has his lines. They're very clear to him, if not to anyone else."

“So, he only felt bad because of his pride?”

“No.” Carol let out a breath. “I was a little dazed, as you can imagine. But even through that, I’d never seen him look so terrified. I still haven’t. He got stuck thinking how he could’ve killed me.”

“He could have.”

“But he didn’t. And what he did do, he didn’t mean. Not in the way he usually doesn’t mean things, when he makes deliberate choices to fuck up our lives, then acts shocked when I’m angry, upset. It wasn’t him. He wasn’t even there. He was on some beach, months or years before. Can you understand that?”

“You never told Abby?”

“She hated him even then, long before I did. She’d never let it go, just like he didn’t. She was off on her own travels, and by the time she returned, everything was healed up good as new.”

“But it wasn’t.”

Carol rubbed her hand against Therese’s kneecap, through the fabric of her robe. “Some wounds are harder to close. But all in all, it probably improved the trip. I got to stay in where it was nice and cool—at least cooler—Harge waited on me hand and foot, and I got out of having sex with him for weeks after.”

Therese knew Carol wanted her to laugh, at least smile. She couldn’t. “What did your family think?”

“They didn’t think anything.”

“What? You were hurt!”

“And married, and in Virginia. Therese,” Carol gave her another of those sad smiles. “You had a good father, and then you were raised by nuns. Things are different sometimes.”

“So what happened?”

“Harge yelled for a doctor, my cousins called up the only one they knew who probably hadn't drank too much that weekend, and my sister drove us down to his clinic because I'd tripped over my own feet. 'Must've had a few too many juleps'."

“Harge told them that?”

“They told themselves that. No one asked me what happened, no one asked Harge. No one asks questions when you're married to a war veteran from a good family, Therese. Especially not down there. It’s just, it’s different.”

Carol seemed to be waiting for a response. Therese couldn’t give one. Not without making this about her and her anger at things that were just different.

When Therese didn’t try to fill the silence, Carol kept going. “When they came running, my brother-in-law made a joke about how I must have tripped wearing those damn lady-like sandals. My sister, while helping me up, said she'd obviously need to have the boys fix the floor, if I was tripping over uneven boards."

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

"What about back home? You had family here, he did."

“His mother swore it was my fault that her dear son wouldn’t eat red meat anymore. It took about a year for him to try it again, half as long before he was ready for fish, things like that, and I had to do it slowly. To this day he won’t touch pork. At least he wouldn’t when I was still cooking his meals.”

“And you never told Abby.” Therese was still struggling to comprehend that.

“I don’t actually tell her _everything_ ,” Carol said in a teasing tone that was gone by her next sentence. “It was tense enough between Abby and Harge, and Abby’s never left well enough alone when it comes to him.”

“Good.”

Therese wasn’t trying to be funny, but Carol laughed anyway. “Sometimes yes. Mostly yes,” she amended. “But this was—"

“Different?”

Carol narrowed her eyes, but her lips were turned up at the corners, and she kept a firm hold on Therese’s hand. “I know you’re being difficult, my darling, but yes. She’s never cared the slightest bit for men, she didn’t have any brothers or close family in the war. She wouldn’t have understood, at least not with Harge. All she’d see was that he made me bleed, and she’d never look at him the same way again. I couldn’t have that.”

“And what, she’d look at him with contempt, disgust? How is that different from now?”

Again, Therese wasn’t trying to be funny and again Carol chuckled. “Fair point. But it’s different. Even with them, it would’ve been different.”

Therese thought of all this, tried organizing it in her mind. “Harge hurt you,” she said. “But Steve, he was protecting them.”

“I know,” Carol replied. “And if he’d been a little more awake that weekend, I might’ve ended up with blood in my hair from Harge tackling me, saving me from enemy fire. Instead he was sleeping, he didn’t know I was there. And Steve is much harder to kill than a typical soldier. He doesn’t need to protect himself, but others? Wasn’t there something about him jumping on a grenade, when he was still skinny?”

“It was fake.”

“Does it matter, if he didn’t know that?”

“Peggy was doing that with Jake,” Therese said, ashamed she hadn’t thought more about that part.

“I know,” Carol said. Just that, and Therese understood. If bombs or bullets started raining down, Carol would throw herself over Rindy without a thought. So would she.

“You really think Steve would’ve hurt me?” The idea was almost impossible to fathom.

“Probably not.”

“Probably?”

“He bench-presses motorcycles,” Carol said, tightening the fingers splayed out over Therese’s thigh. “I wasn’t risking it. Clearly, he knows how to control his strength, normally. He’d never be able to function otherwise.” Carol shook her head. “I wasn’t risking it.”

“Carol…”

Carol leaned forward and hugged her. Therese returned it, let Carol hold her a little too tight, because Therese was doing the same.

Carol broke the hug, but held on to one of Therese’s hands, kissed the knuckles again. Her eyes pinned Therese in place as surely as any hold would have. “You do understand,” Carol said, “that it wasn’t Harge’s fault, don’t you?”

Therese hadn’t answered when Carol asked that before. With her free hand, she reached up to find the spot of imperfect skin above Carol’s hairline. She was intercepted, Carol catching her wrist in midair.

“Therese?” Carol squeezed the delicate bones in her grasp lightly. Showed much more care with Therese’s body than Harge had with hers. “I need you to understand, honey.”

“Why?”

Therese didn’t want to understand Harge. She was, in fact, disgusted with herself for letting her loathing of him cool in the last few months. A few months of him mimicking the behavior of a human being and she’d pushed all the awful things he’d done to a back corner of her mind.

He’d hurt Carol. Again and again and again. More than Therese ever knew about or probably ever would.

“Because I do,” Carol said, and it almost sounded like an apology. “Because it’s important to me.”

“Why?” Therese repeated. “If you expect me to feel sorry for him—”

“I don’t.” Lowering their joined hands, Carol returned them to her lap, held on to Therese’s. “You don’t need to pity him, or sympathize. You just need to understand that it isn’t the same.”

“Why?” Therese asked, frustrated with herself, with Harge, even with Carol. “Why does it matter?”

“Because it’s not the same,” Carol repeated. “All those horrible things he’s done? This isn’t like that. And if we say that it is, if we group them together, it makes those things he is responsible for…” Carol struggled visibly. “It’s not his fault. This one thing isn’t on him. Grabbing the girls isn't on Steve, covering Jake isn't on Peggy, and this isn't on Harge.”

“Then who is it on?”

“Rich men, politicians. Men in nice offices thousands of miles away from the ones who were fighting their war. Who didn’t care if one man died or came back broken, so long as they won.”

“You sound like Peggy.”

“What does that tell you?” Carol took a breath. “If you had grabbed Steve. If you got to him before I got to you, and he’d thrown you to the ground, broken your ankle. Would you blame him?”

“It’s different.”

“If you’d been closer to Peggy when the noise started and Peggy pinned you to the ground, got sand in your nose, your mouth while trying to protect you, would you blame her?”

“It’s different.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re good!” Therese said, louder than she meant to. “Peggy and Steve are good. They don’t hurt people on purpose.”

“They were at war, Therese. You don’t think they’ve hurt people?”

“They’re not like Harge.”

“No, thank God.” Carol sighed. “You think I don’t know what I’m asking you, how hard it is?”

“So why ask?”

“Because you’re better than me. You’ve always been. And I need you to be better than me now.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If Steve had hurt you, I don’t know that I’d be able to forgive him. Not the way you would. I’m a goddamn hypocrite, I know, expecting you to do what I couldn’t do myself. No matter how good Steve is.”

“Carol…”

“I’m a goddamn hypocrite, but you’re not. You’re better than that. So, if you’d forgive Steve, or Peggy, then you have to forgive Harge. Not everything. Just this.”

Therese thought about it for long seconds. She knew things rationally that she didn’t want to know. Rationality didn’t always matter. “Why?” Therese asked, her voice sounding strained to her own ears. “Why does it matter? Did you love him that much?”

“It’s not about love. Not like that. I don’t want to be like him. And I certainly don’t want you to be like him.”

“Like who?”

“Harge.”

Therese was well and truly lost. “What?”

“I don’t want to blame him, hate him, for something he had no control over. He did that to me, to us, and I don’t want that. Even I can only take so much hypocrisy.”

Therese shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“We can’t control who we love. Us two, Abby, Peggy and Angie. But he’s held it against us. Others would.”

“What we do doesn’t hurt anyone,” Therese argued. She didn’t want their love compared to anything about Harge.

“Harge?” said Carol. “Richard?”

“We didn’t set out to hurt them. We just…we had to.” She hadn’t enjoyed breaking up with Richard. Hadn’t felt as bad about it as she should have, but she hadn’t gotten any joy from his pain. “We had to,” Therese repeated, because now that she’d lived it, life without Carol was totally unthinkable.

“He had to as well. In that moment, those moments? Harge had to defend himself, Steve and Peggy had to defend the children.”

“He hurt you. He hurt you, like he always does.”

“He didn’t. It’s different. You know it is,” said Carol. “You know because I know, and you’re much smarter than me.”

“Stop,” said Therese, sniffling.

“It’s true. You’re smarter, kinder, and I need that from you now. Please?”

Please. She’d said that to Harge too, earlier.

Therese had to work up to answering. Her throat was tight. “I need time. You’ve had ten years, I’ve had ten minutes, I—"

“I know. I know, Therese. Take whatever you need. I know it’s a lot, I’m asking a lot. Take what you need, alright?”

Therese listened, pulling Carol close. She pressed her face into the solidness of Carol’s shoulder until she could close her eyes without seeing Carol falling back, hearing the sound of Carol’s skull connecting with the heater, feeling the stickiness of blood as it stained Carol’s beautiful hair.

Therese pulled back enough to lift her hand to Carol’s forehead. Carol didn’t stop her this time. Gingerly, Therese combed her fingers through Carol’s hair. It took longer to find the old injury without Carol’s help, but Therese was determined to know this place on her own. Carol seemed to understand, let Therese explore. Her eyes fluttered closed and Therese saw some of the tension leave her face.

When she finally located it, the place that’d once been broken, Therese pressed her fingers there, drawing gentle circles, trying to memorize the feel of what had once been Carol’s pain.

“It’s okay,” Carol promised. “You know how hard-headed I am. This is nothing.”

“Don’t say that,” Therese argued, the words harsher than she meant them to sound. “Don’t call it nothing.”

“Okay, you’re right. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

“You’re bossy in the morning,” Carol said, a real smile pulling at her lips.

“I wouldn’t have to be if you weren’t so hard-headed.” Therese laughed a little. It made her chest hurt.

“At least he had the courtesy to put it somewhere that wouldn’t show. Bastard.”

“God you’re vain,” Therese said on another laugh.

It took a few seconds at most for the laughter to become tears. As soon as it did, Carol’s arms wrapped around her again, tight. Carol didn’t say it was okay, that it was nothing. She simply held on while Therese cried and then, soon, held on while they cried together.

* * *

Angie slept late on Sunday morning, only waking briefly to say goodbye to the kids. Without leaving the comfort of her bed. Jake gave her one of his patented slobbery kisses, heavy on the slobber, while Lizzie sat on Peggy’s legs, occasionally using them as a trampoline, before Steve grabbed up both kids for their early morning trip to Nonna and Nonno’s.

God, but it was nice having a husband who only needed two hours sleep a week.

She woke to sunlight on her face and the smell of bacon. Stretching languidly, she dragged herself out of bed with a yawn, threw on a robe, and went through the essentials of her morning routine.

It was nice, also to be away from her eight siblings, who all scarfed food like stick-thin orphans that hadn’t eaten in days. No more racing for plates, getting kicked in the shin by Angel over the last pancake. Granted, she still lived with two people who hoovered up food like they’d never seen it before, but Peg and Steve at least had the good grace (and survival instinct) to leave her plenty.

Downstairs, Steve was at the stove, barefoot and shirtless, jeans resting low on his hips. While he worked a spatula, Peggy had her arms around him from behind, the silk of her robe pressed to his bare skin. Her mouth trailed along the back of Steve’s neck, shoulders.

“That’s unsafe,” Angie said, rounding the counter and gesturing at Steve’s bare chest. “And unsanitary. You’d never make it at the L&L.”

“I have an in with their best waitress. Maybe there I could cook the meals without being attacked.”

“Poor baby,” said Angie, grabbing a mug from the cabinet. She stopped near them, hip resting on the counter as she poured herself coffee. Peggy wasn’t just kissing Steve’s skin, she was biting, hard enough to leave marks in her wake. “Payback?” Angie asked, reaching with her thumb to caress one of the hickeys dotting Peggy’s throat.

“I’m hungry,” Peggy replied.

“I’m shocked,” Angie said, enjoying the sight of Steve in jeans, which he wouldn’t choose to wear on his own, not on a Sunday morning with no one there to impress.

Kissing Peggy’s cheek, Angie moved so she could see Steve’s middle better, and the nails that were digging into it. Peggy was marking him there too, as much as she could in the few seconds before the tiny wounds disappeared, replaced with perfectly smooth skin. “Watch the claws,” Angie said, bumping her shoulder against Peggy’s as she walked past. “No blood under anyone’s nails before breakfast.”

That too reminded her of breakfast at home, except it used to be her Ma saying it, and when one of her little brothers came down showing off the imaginary chest hair he’d sprouted, Angie was more likely to throw an apple at the offender’s head than she was to enjoy the view.

Angie sat at the table with a plate of bacon and eggs, and the Sunday _Times_ in front of her, unsurprised that Peggy made no move towards the food. “Therese has another couple of photos in this week,” she said, folding the page over.

“Good for her.”

Steve’s answer came slightly muffled. Angie glanced up, saw his back against the counter. Pinned between it and Peggy, Steve had a hand on her waist as she kissed him. She was standing on his feet to regain some of the height she lost without heels.

Angie grabbed a stray pen from the other side of the table and began working the Sunday puzzle.

She ate for several minutes, squinting at the harder clues and scratching out mistakes. Peggy and Steve remained mostly in her peripheral vision, until she was forced to call in reinforcements. “Six down. Winner of four gold medals in the 1936 summer Olympics. Wasn’t that the Hitler Olympics?"

“Jesse Owens, and yes,” said Peggy, detaching her lips from Steve’s long enough to answer.

“Thanks, baby.”

If she were a different kind of person, she might feel a little stupid around them. Peggy was a former codebreaker turned founder of SHIELD, who knew a little bit of almost every language. Steve had a better memory than that robot Howard swore held more information than any library, and that thing had been pretty impressive until it blew up.

Steve could remember exactly who had been standing where and shooting at whom during a battle that took place in ’44. And he hadn’t answered her crossword question.

In fairness, he was occupied, his hands beneath Peggy’s robe, which was no longer closed. Peggy’s nails dug half-moons into his skin, and he growled when she circled one of his nipples, probably pouting that he couldn’t return the favor just now. Breastfeeding was a whole mess of pros and cons.

Marking her next clue, Angie stood, crossed the kitchen to join them. “Hey,” she said, nipping lightly at Steve’s jaw before he could go in to kiss Peggy again. “What say we move this along, huh? You know how I feel about sex in the kitchen.”

“Your opinions on the subject are well documented. And frustrating,” said Peggy, tracing the lines of Steve’s abs with her fingers. “The burner is off.”

She’d seen Steve do that from the corner of her eye, without opening his own eyes or breaking contact with Peggy. It was sort of impressive, not that she’d tell him. “You know how I feel,” she repeated.

“I was not the one who caused that burn, and neither was he. I’m sure the poor girl barely remembers it now.”

“Her skirt caught fire while I was going for third. She remembers.”

“Be that as it may, your teenage mishaps shouldn’t preclude me from having a shag in my own kitchen.”

“No? How about you stop pretending you can’t toast a piece of bread, then. Do some of the cooking instead of leaving it all to Steve and I. Then it can be your kitchen too, and you can decide what happens in it.”

Peggy scowled.

“Yeah. Thought so.” Turning her attention back to Steve, Angie touched his hair, kissed him more softly than what he and Peggy had been doing. “Help me out here, honey.”

Steve, who’d had his spine pressed against the counter long enough to hurt anyone else, pushed off of it easily. He lifted Peggy without blinking.

“Caveman,” Peggy said, wrapping arms around his neck and her legs around his waist.

Before Steve took his first step to the living room, they were kissing again Peggy grabbed his face, reddened skin where her thumbs pressed into his cheeks. The color was gone almost before it appeared. Angie trailed behind them, stopping to grab her coffee off the table.

“ _Fuck_!”

Steve’s exclamation was sudden enough that Angie almost burned herself with the coffee, which she guessed she deserved after what happened to poor Beatrice Schultz sophomore year. Angie panicked for a moment, until she saw what Steve was doing. He’d switched to holding Peggy one handed, her weight resting on his forearm. He was also down to one foot, balanced that way as he used his free hand to grab the toy he’d stepped on.

“Fucking Legos.” Making no effort to hide his anger and disdain, he tossed the green block aside, where it would definitely cause the same problem later.

Angie chuckled, cradling her coffee cup in both hands. “That would be why people shouldn’t walk around with their eyes shut, Mr. Tactical Genius. Even super soldiers.”

“Have Howard buy that fucking company,” Steve said, righting himself. “Guy who invented those things should be locked up with Red Skull’s people.”

Angie had tried to explain to Therese about Steve and pain once. At Jake’s baptism, her second cousin skipped the church and showed up only for the food (typical), dropping her kid off on anyone who’d tolerate him. Since precious little Giovanni was teething, Steve wound up on top of that list. Angie explained to Therese, as those needle teeth chewed away on Steve’s thumb, how it wasn’t that he didn’t feel the pain, like most people thought, he just stopped feeling it a lot sooner than most.

Thus his ongoing battle with Lizzie’s choice of toy. Angie found it interesting that Legos were the bane of Steve’s existence, but he didn’t seem to notice what Peggy’s nails were doing to his skin.

Steve recovered quickly, resuming his march. Angie took a few long sips of coffee knowing she’d need the energy, then ditched her mug on the nearest end table. Mama would kill her for not using a coaster, but she didn’t have the time. She was, in fact, barely fast enough to grab the old throw blanket from the end of the couch and lay it out on the floor before Steve and Peggy collapsed there.

Those two wouldn’t mind the aches that came from doing it on a hardwood floor, but Angie certainly would, and Peggy was bruised enough already.

Retrieving her coffee, Angie sat herself down on the ottoman across from where they’d landed. Peggy sat atop Steve, pulling his face up by the chin. Steve kissed her, pulling at the open robe Peggy was already shrugging off.

“Careful,” Angie said. “That’s my favorite robe to steal.”

Steve’s hands twitched, loosening in the fabric. He helped get rid of the robe, tossed it aside, but his movements were more controlled.

Angie did not actually care very much if the piece of fabric got wrecked. It would give her an excuse to buy Peggy something new, ideally one of Ana Jarvis’s masterpieces. Peggy wouldn’t care about her clothes either, especially not now.

Steve would though. Later.

Without a belt, his jeans were low enough that they could probably slide off without being unbuttoned. Peggy didn’t do that though. She caught Steve’s hands, nuzzled and kissed some of his fingers, then pushed them out of her way. She freed him from the denim, collapsing the tent bulging there, but didn’t remove the jeans. She either wanted him half-dressed today, or she was getting off on him being a little constricted. Probably both.

Grabbing Peggy’s hips, Steve spread his fingers over her bare ass. He made a choked off grunt of a sound as Peggy took his cock in her hand, teased herself with it. Bumping the head against herself, Peggy kept one hand on Steve’s shoulder.

They both made sounds that had Angie’s thighs rubbing together under her robe, but she made herself focus. Steve’s hands had become restless with Peggy’s motions, gone up along her ribs. Ribs that already looked too much like she’d been in a fight. Peggy didn’t react to it. She looked something like she did when Angie caught her in her office, reading her top-secret spy stuff. Angie would knock on the door, whether it was open or closed, and Peggy would look up and cover whatever she’d been working on. In the first few seconds before Peggy changed gears, became Angie’s Peggy instead of SHIELD’s Director, Angie saw the remnants of that intensity, that almost scary focus Peggy had. Being on the receiving end of that gaze when it was aimed full force at you, that was quite a thing, and not always a good one.

Angie was figuring out how to handle this without being obvious that she was handling it when Steve solved the problem for her. Meeting her gaze over Peggy’s shoulder, he lifted one arm long enough to beckon her forward, then returned his hand to Peggy’s body.

Setting her coffee aside, Angie measured her steps as she crossed the small distance. She set a calm pace against the frantic way Steve and Peggy were going. Settling herself next to him on the blanket, Angie took Steve’s face in her hands. She kissed him slowly, her tongue meeting his in a gentle rhythm, a counterpoint. She kissed him to distraction, until she was able to reach over and move his hand on Peggy’s ribs to a place where the skin was less battered.

“Let me see your eyes, baby,” she murmured, stroking his cheek. She bumped her nose against the bridge of his. “Steve.”

She did not call him Soldier, having avoided it for the better part of two weeks. He blinked his eyes open. The blue wasn’t as clear as usual, making the hint of green more noticeable. He looked a little foggy, like he’d just woken from sleep, which he most certainly hadn’t.

Angie smiled her thanks, saw everything in him tense and relax as Peggy finally drew his cock inside of her. Peggy made a beautiful, filthy grunt of a noise, but Angie was paying more attention to Steve. His breathing sped up, his fingers clenching again.

“Shhh,” Angie murmured, guiding his head onto her shoulder, his face turned into to her neck. “Just go easy, baby. Easy.”

She wasn’t saying it for her own benefit, searching for her own gratification. Steve just rested there, shuddered his breath into her skin, and Angie let him. She’d only led him to one of her favorite weak spots so he could find the pulse point there, hear it. So he’d have something to anchor him besides Peggy’s body.

Angie hadn’t realized at first how sharp his senses were. No one really talked about that, not in any of the museum exhibits or the articles, or the amazingly terrible radio show. Everyone knew he was big and strong and fast, but Angie hadn’t known until she met him how much information he was sorting through all the time. He could take in every detail of a battle at a glance, plan accordingly, and he could hear the screams of every man on the field, wounded or worse. When blood soaked into his suit, he smelled it long after all the traces were washed out. Gunshots rang in his ears longer and louder than in anyone else’s, and sometimes it was too much.

Peggy had the same problem. On a different scale, but Angie barely registered that anymore. They both went away sometimes. Brown eyes and blue both changed, went off to cloudy, scary places. That part she understood. She’d seen it enough with Papa, and Angel, and half the boys in the old neighborhood. She couldn’t follow them there, but she understood what was happening.

The cuts and the bruises, those were harder to wrap her head around. She didn’t understand how they could heal each other by trying to break each other. How this roughness, this rush of sensations that weren’t all pleasant, could be soothing. They’d tried explaining it to her, and even now she only half-grasped it. Half, she’d learned, had to be enough.

Angie tried to join in, once. To prove herself, which was stupid, she realized now. She didn’t need to prove anything, to herself or them, didn’t need to keep up. She’d tried once, and it was disastrous for all involved. It took awhile for them to figure out her role. For Angie to realize that she didn’t have to follow them everywhere, that sometimes it was better if she didn’t. For her and for them.

She’d been horrified the first time she saw Peggy’s body like this. It made her stomach queasy. That first time, though, she saw the evidence after the act, hadn’t seen how they got there. She hadn’t realized that Steve was almost never the one pushing. He simply left bruises so easily, and the smallest slips of control left so much evidence. Peggy being rough with Steve in times like this was Peggy letting loose everything, surrendering all control and inhibition to perhaps the one person on Earth who could handle that.

Steve being rough with Peggy meant letting himself go, just barely. It meant being what Peggy needed while trying to process an insane amount of sensation, physical and otherwise.

Which was why, much as she enjoyed watching Peggy sink herself down again and again and again on Steve, Angie was focused on him right now.

Gently, she laid him back so that he was flat against the blanket, using her hand to brace his head and neck. While Peggy rocked and moaned with an abandon that wasn’t possible while the kids were here, Angie laid herself down next to Steve, propped up on an elbow. While Peggy marked the canvas that was Steve’s torso, leaving there and gone wounds in her wake, Angie kissed Steve slowly, humming nonsense sounds as he reacted to their ministrations. She wouldn’t talk to him unless she had to, wouldn’t give him one more thing to make sense of in his brain.

Angie did this for long minutes, stroking Steve’s hair, his face. She removed her hand from the back of his head so she could rest it against his heartbeat, feel the thud there. He would feel it more if Angie did, if she brought the right amount of attention to it. He’d feel it and know that he was alright.

Steve held on to Peggy, helped drive her down onto him. Sometimes Angie reached out again, steered his hands higher or lower. He’d lost himself with the bruise on Peggy’s leg, the one Therese saw. Hardly a catastrophe, but nothing either Steve or Peggy would be eager to repeat when they were able to care about such things again.

Peggy hadn’t done this with her. There were several years of just the two of them before Steve returned, and many, many nights when Angie could tell Peggy was in need of something. It was this, Angie wouldn’t realize until Steve came home. This, which Peggy never once asked Angie for. Probably why it bothered her so much in the beginning, why Angie insisted on participating in a way she didn’t truly want, and they knew she didn’t want. Angie was hardly delicate; she didn’t need everything all soft and sweet. The first time Steve shoved her into a wall--with carefully modulated strength and eyes that never left her face--Angie had nearly ruined her panties. She could take rough and she could give it, depending on the mood of everyone involved, but this was something else.

Peggy disappeared. That was a fact of their relationship from the start, even when Angie was still pretending to be straight, Peggy was still pretending she worked for the phone company, and Angie was still pretending to believe her. In the beginning, she would suddenly be gone from her booth at the L&L, sometimes with a hastily scrawled apology on a napkin, always with a very generous tip. When they became neighbors, Peggy would sneak out of her apartment at odd hours with such frequency that Angie had, for more than a little while, thought she might be a lady of the night. Now, Peggy didn’t leave as much. She delegated, ran the whole ship instead of taking assignments from someone else. She couldn’t have run off on missions every other day even if she wanted to. The absences that were so frequent and infuriating and terrifying ten years ago were few and far between these days.

Peggy, in times like these, ran the risk of disappearing. She was, more than usual, lost in her own head, in her own needs. Nothing wrong with that, God knew Peggy needed to put herself first more often. But it meant that she and Steve, usually so in sync with each other, weren’t. Peggy couldn’t respond to Steve’s needs in this state unless he voiced them and, when it was like this, Steve had a harder time doing that.

As close as Peggy and Steve were in these moments, as much as they needed to be with each other, to feel each other, they were also farther away than usual.

Angie realized, eventually, that she didn’t need or want to be in the middle of this with them. She needed to stand outside of it and bridge the gap.

Angie touched the pads of her thumbs to Steve’s abs, watching the muscles jump under her touch while Peggy kept up the fruitless quest of leaving a mark on him. Angie kissed him and nuzzled him and, when she saw something in his eyes that she wasn’t sure of, she asked if he was okay. Always, she kept her voice soft. Sometimes she had to ask more than once before he’d nod. He couldn’t manage anything beyond that. Or knew he didn’t need to.

It didn’t take long, not with how tightly wound both of them were. Steve came first, and Angie couldn’t blame him, not the way Peggy was going. His hands clutched and spasmed and Angie knew Peggy would have more bruises soon, that it had to hurt.

Peggy loved it, unabashedly. She grabbed his shoulder, pulling him up from where he’d been on his back next to Angie. She gave him more of those hard, punishing kisses that Angie could only take in small doses, and only when she was in a particular mood. Holding him close against her, grunting and rocking into his lap, Peggy chased her orgasm as doggedly as she occasionally hoofed it after enemies of the US government. For anyone else, going after it so intensely would only keep it out of reach.

Peggy wasn’t anyone else.

They spent a few minutes coming down. Peggy clung to Steve, and Angie touched his back, guided him to lay down again. Peggy moved with him, lay on his chest, her expression confused as she looked at Angie.

“You got the boy good, sweetheart,” Angie said. “Think he needs to stay horizontal for a minute.”

Steve had yet to say a word, hadn’t since he hit the floor with Peggy. The closest he’d gotten was a sob, something vaguely resembling Peggy’s name when the two of them separated.

Peggy blinked, frowned, then her expression cleared. As Angie moved to sit up, tired of bracing her weight on her elbow, Peggy reached over. Catching her chin in a light grip, Peggy graced her with a wordless smile. Then she kissed Steve, both of her hands on his face. It was a soft, calm thing, everything the last few minutes weren’t. One kiss became a series of smaller ones against the edges of Steve’s mouth.

Angie exhaled as she watched the two of them breathe the same air. She drew her knees up, hugging them, keeping them close together to deal with the low ache in her body. It could be annoying like this, confusing in a way other times weren’t. The tinge of unease at knowing what a fine line all three of them were walking, it made the arousal harder to process.

Peggy broke the kiss, eyes roaming shamelessly over Angie. One of her hands moved to play in Steve’s hair while the other rubbed his chest. She used only her palm, in slow, loving circles, as if to soothe wounds that weren’t there. “Would you like a turn?” she asked.

Angie smiled, less at the teasing tone than at the eyes she recognized again. “Eh,” she said, putting more effort into ignoring the thrum between her legs. “Rubbers are all the way upstairs. And going without is fine when you’re good to move in time, and not all sticky and gooey already,” Angie said. She reached down to tease a finger across Steve’s lips, taking any sting out of her words and testing how out of it he really was. “We used to have condoms downstairs, in every room,” she said. “That was nice, convenient. Why don’t we do that anymore?”

“Because we have children now,” said Peggy. “As lovely as it might have been, it clearly wasn’t that effective.” She smiled at Angie, her cheek pressed to Steve’s chest, unconcerned by the mess now all over his jeans. “He’s a fantastic listener,” she said. “And he does have a mouth. Mouths don’t require rubber.”

“Not today anyways,” said Angie. Even with the kids gone and hours stretched out in front of them, there were only so many once in awhile things Angie would agree to in one day.

“I do have a mouth,” Steve said against Angie’s finger. “And I’m right here,” he added, his tongue jutting out for the briefest of moments to touch the pad of Angie’s index finger.

At that, Angie lost more of the bad kind of tension. She wouldn’t have pushed him on it, not yet, but she’d needed to hear Steve speak again, needed to see another tiny step from him as he came back to himself. He didn’t quite sound like him, there was a certain kind of vulnerability she rarely heard, but he was speaking, and that was good. “Well look at that,” she said, and then kissed him. “I was starting to worry you were just a very pretty piece of decoration, sweetheart.”

Steve made a small huff of a noise, put an arm around Angie’s shoulders. “Not pretty. I’m rugged and handsome.”

Peggy kissed Steve’s jaw. “Mmm. Rugged, handsome. And very pretty.”

Steve made the noise again. His fingers toyed with the fabric of the robe covering Angie’s shoulder. “Why are you still so dressed?” he asked, nearly making it into a whine.

Angie kissed him again, teasing, then sat up. Slow but obliging, she fiddled with the tie of her robe before undoing the loose knot. She shrugged it partway off, exposing a bare shoulder to Steve’s touch. “Happy now?”

“Getting there.”

Mostly naked and hovering over them, Angie ran a hand through Peggy’s curls, then touched it to Steve’s cheek. “You two still with me?”

Peggy reached up, touched Angie’s breast in a move that was gentler than anything Angie had seen so far. “Yes,” Peggy said, voice as soft as the fingers massaging Angie’s nipple. “Thank you, darling.”

Angie sighed at the sensation, at Peggy’s expert caresses. She made herself focus, kept herself from getting lost there yet. “Steve?” she asked, watching him carefully.

“With you,” he said, making it into a plea as much as a confirmation. “Angie?”

“I’m here,” she promised, shrugging her robe the rest of the way off. “I’m right here.”

* * *

“I found you,” Carol said, a glass of wine in her hand as she passed through the doors onto their balcony. “So why do I feel like you’re so far away?”

Therese smiled, adjusted herself on the lounge chair. It was getting late, but the sun was still hanging on, enough for her to see the photos she’d just developed. “I’m here,” she said, moving so she was sat sideways on the chair, setting the pictures next to her.

“That was a deep frown,” Carol said, placing her glass on the small table next to them. Stopping in front of Therese, Carol kissed the top of her head. “What, did you shoot me from my bad side?”

Therese scoffed. “Can’t shoot something that isn’t there.”

“May I?” Carol asked, nodding at the space next to Therese.

“Of course.” The simple courtesy warmed her, Carol knowing that she tended to get lost in herself when it came to photographs, that she liked it that way sometimes.

Carol took the invitation, settling next to Therese. “Really. Everything all right? Your camera wasn’t damaged by the water?”

“Was I frowning that much?”

“Yes.”

“The camera’s fine, and don’t you dare breathe a word that makes them think any different.”

It was Tuesday night. The client Abby had dinner with on Saturday had called that afternoon. Carol and Abby were both exceedingly happy with the conversation. Angie had phoned the night before, congratulated Therese on her pictures in the Sunday edition. She asked how the rest of their time with Rindy went, but made no mention of anything that happened on the beach.

“May I see?” Carol asked, eyeing the stack of photos on Therese’s other side.

Therese hesitated barely a second before handing them over. “Don’t smudge.”

“I know, darling,” Carol replied, her lips turning up at the corners. “You’ve mentioned.”

Therese leaned against Carol’s arm as Carol began scanning the pile. Therese wasn’t looking at the photos as much as she was watching Carol’s reactions to them, the subtle changes in expression as Carol studied what she’d done. It was an old habit, cultivated that first night Carol came to her apartment, scrutinizing the pictures within. Therese still remembered the butterflies, the nerves over what Carol might think, trying to guess the answers on her own. It wasn’t so hard anymore. Therese was infinitely better at reading Carol now, and Carol didn’t try to hide her thoughts.

The butterflies remained. Fewer of them, less active, but there. A reminder of the first time they opened up to each other, Carol through her tears, Therese through her photos.

No matter how much time passed, Therese still wanted to impress Carol, wanted Carol to be proud of the moments she’d stolen with her camera.

So, Therese watched Carol as Carol saw those moments for the first time. She watched Carol shake her head in amusement at the image of Lizzie literally standing on her father’s shoulders. Lizzie had her arms spread wide, not the slightest bit worried about falling with Steve gripping her ankles. Carol laughed openly at Jacob, photographed mid-crawl, using Steve’s belly as an island of safety amidst the dry sand he found so abhorrent. Steve simply laid on his back in the sand, one hand behind his head, the other on Jake’s back, helping him balance.

Pictures of Rindy brought that special glow to Carol’s eyes. Rindy laid out on the lounge chair next to Carol’s, mimicking her mother’s position. Three seconds after the photo was taken, Rindy had grown bored, practically bounced off the chair to more rewarding pursuits.

There were photos of Angie in her bikini and sunglasses, looking every inch the Hollywood starlet, and just as many of her making absurd faces at the camera, sometimes to amuse the children, sometimes Therese, most often herself.

Jake featured heavily in the stack. Therese enjoyed capturing his reactions to sand, to waves, to ice cream. Peggy doted on him, showing him how to use the plastic pail and shovel they’d brought along. Carol laughed again at the look of indignation on his face as Peggy caught his hands midair, kept him from eating the wet sand. He was crushing two of Lizzie’s army men in one photo, waving one in each hand like a very happy King Kong.

And then Carol moved to the last picture in the stack.

“Oh,” she said quietly, her smile disappearing.

Therese hadn’t meant to get that shot. Hadn’t realized she’d gotten it at all until she saw it forming under the photo chemicals in her darkroom. She’d almost forgotten that she’d had her camera aimed at Peggy when the firework went off. Then she’d seen the picture. There was a slight blur to it that Therese knew wasn’t her fault. She’d caught Peggy in motion, hit the right angle at the wrong time,

When she remembered back to it, Therese thought the picture was wrong. Peggy was sat with Jake, her legs crossed. Lizzie’s toy soldiers could be seen half-buried in the sand next to them, with a little squinting. They were small and forgotten, and Therese was sure that Lizzie lost most of them by the end of the day.

In the photo, Peggy held Jake by his armpits, already angling to tuck him under her own body. Therese didn’t remember it like that, didn’t think Peggy had moved that fast, but the proof was there.

Peggy, in that frozen instant, was not.

It was an odd contrast, the rest of Peggy’s body in motion, primed to protect her child, while her eyes were so blank. Therese had never seen such a lifeless gaze. The eyes and the body belonged in two separate photos. It almost scared Therese, in a way that was similar to and completely different from the way seeing Steve on the beach covering the girls had scared her.

“Damn," Carol said.

“You see it then?” Therese asked.

“Not for a long time, but yes.”

Therese leaned more heavily against Carol’s arm, exhaling. She’d doubted her own eyes, her own mind, when she first saw the picture. It was so hard to describe what was wrong with it exactly, put it into words. She’d wondered what she was seeing, and if she wouldn’t be the only one. “I don’t know what to do about it.”

Carol turned her head to look at Therese. “What do you mean?”

“I should toss it, right?”

“It’s your photo,” Carol said, the way she did when she was choosing her words carefully.

“But I should toss it.”

“What would you like to do with it?” Carol sat back, moved the pile of discarded photos to the other side of her on the chair, but held on to the last.

“Nothing. I don’t know.” Whitmore would pay a fortune for it, she knew, as surely as she knew that she’d never bring it within a mile of him. “I didn’t mean to take it.”

“It’s not your fault,” Carol said after a beat of silence. The hand not holding the photo landed on Therese’s thigh, making slow, chaste patterns. “What happened to them or, or anything else. Accidentally taking a picture doesn’t make it your fault.”

Accidentally. She’d taken this picture accidentally, others less so. When the snowstorm hit and she first reached the Martinelli home, Therese had taken several shots of the search effort. It was instinctive. Not planned, but not accidental either. She’d promised herself she’d destroy the whole roll later and she had, with minimal hesitation. One picture versus an entire roll of film, but this was where she faltered.

“It doesn’t feel right,” she said. “Having it, or getting rid of it.”

“Why not getting rid of it?”

Carol wasn’t judging her, not that Therese could see. She was curious, confused, but not judging. That helped, but Therese wished it helped more. “I always take…the pictures I take of them, the ones people see? It’s always the same photo. Maybe Angie’s in it or not, or Steve’s holding the baby instead of Peggy, but it’s always the same picture. It’s them happy and, and basking in this post-war glow, as if everything’s perfect. We won, the bad guys are gone, happily ever after. That’s what it’s like in every photo.”

“I suppose it is,” said Carol. “I suppose people find it comforting after so much hurt.”

“I know, and that’s, I understand that. It helps, but maybe it doesn’t help, not always.”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s like…like going to J.C. Penny.” Carol’s eyebrows lifted, and Therese rushed to continue. “The photo studio. Family portraits. Parents bring in children all done up in uncomfortable clothes and they put them under hot lights and make them behave and the children scream and cry and fight with each other. They're so unhappy and throwing fits the whole time, until the photographer tells them to smile and then they stop and everything's alright for those few seconds. Then they're right back to being upset and fighting. Their mothers just yell at them to be nice, to look presentable, and the babies who've been crying always get the compliments on how long their lashes look in the pictures, how sparkly their eyes are. They're only okay for a second, but that’s the one people see on the mantle. Maybe they need someone to tell them it's okay to be unhappy with all of it sometimes. Does that make any sense at all?”

“It does,” Carol replied. “And thank you for making me feel so guilty.”

“I didn’t mean—”

Carol wrapped an arm around Therese’s shoulders. “I know, angel. And yes, it makes sense.” Carol took a moment to speak again. “You see things. In a way others don’t.”

“You’ve said so before.”

“Because it’s true.”

“Sometimes I wish it wasn’t.”

Carol sighed. “I know you do. I know why. But I don’t wish that. I don’t think I ever could.”

Therese sat with that, took what solace she could. “It feels like I’m making it worse,” she said. “Getting rid of it, like it never existed. I take all these photos of them that, they aren’t a lie, but they’re not—”

“Not the whole truth.”

“Exactly. And it’s always the way people want it to look, the way I make it look. It’s not just, just over, just like that. Maybe if more people saw that, maybe…”

Maybe what? Maybe there wouldn’t be so many fireworks? Maybe Steve and Peggy and Angie wouldn’t have to do so many of those photoshoots that all three of them complained over? Maybe Harge wouldn’t have had to be at that barbecue and pretend so much, and Carol wouldn’t have a scar? Therese didn’t know. She’d tried to make sense of it from the moment she saw the picture, but she still didn’t know.

“Maybe it would help,” said Carol, quietly.

“Yes.”

“But you’d have to show it to people.”

“That’s not my choice to make.” She’d never sell it, to Whitmore or anyone else. Not on her own.

“No,” Carol agreed. “You could show them first, see what they say.”

Therese heard the skepticism in Carol’s voice, shared it. Angie, Steve and Peggy had all made a point of not talking about it afterward. Several days on and that was still the case. Showing them the picture might bring nothing but embarrassment, or worse. “I don’t think I can,” Therese admitted, to herself as much as Carol. Whether that was tactfulness or cowardice, she wasn’t sure.

Carol looked down at the photo in her lap, her fingers careful to touch only the edges. “I doubt they’d want you keeping it for your private collection.”

“Private collection,” Therese repeated. “You make it sound dirty.”

“Of course not. Those are only the especially private ones.”

Therese shivered in the warm evening air. It’d taken her three months to convince Carol to pose for them, three more for Carol to convince her that turnabout was fair play. “Don’t distract me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You are not.” Therese tucked her legs beneath her on the lounger, taking comfort from Carol’s closeness. “Why is this so hard?”

“It’s hard because it’s hard,” Carol said. “Because you care.”

“Tell me what to do.”

Carol chuckled. “Sweetheart, it’s been over ten years and I’ve yet to figure that out.”

“Did Harge ever tell you any more about what the fireworks do to him?”

“Bits and pieces. He was different, after. I don’t think he was capable of…” Carol trailed off, exhaled. “He was different. He couldn’t tell me things, and I’m not sure I would’ve known how to hear them if he’d tried.”

“If he wasn’t different, if he hadn’t gone, do you think you two—”

“No,” Carol said, absent anger, but firm. “It would’ve lasted longer, probably, and God knows it lasted too long anyway. No, we were always going to be two puzzle pieces that didn’t fit together. His piece ended up more worn, more broken than it needed to, and yes, it seems some part of me is still sad about that. How irritating.”

“I’m sad for them,” said Therese, looking down at the photo.

Carol kissed Therese’s hair. “Me too. It’s sad to see, it always is, but we saw it. You did. And maybe that’s enough right now.”

Therese looked at Carol, not bothering to verbalize her question.

“They’re forced to be these symbols, to show everyone how we’ve moved on, that everything’s okay. What does Peggy say sometimes about dancing monkeys? That’s not fair, but would it be any fairer to make them the opposite? To make them display their pain to the world so that people like Harge would be able to admit theirs? If they aren’t ready, if they can’t give that after everything they’ve already done…”

Therese nodded against Carol’s shoulder, knew she was right. “It still doesn’t feel like enough. I don’t know why.”

“Because you care. You care, and you underestimate yourself. You always have.”

“Or you overestimate me and always have, and what’s that got to do with it?”

“You saw it. You saw it and I saw it, and we didn’t turn away, did we? We’re not going to treat them any differently because of it?”

“Of course not.”

“No. And they know that, I think. Maybe that’s enough for now, knowing that we saw it, and the world didn’t end. It matters, Therese. Knowing it’s okay to be seen, that it doesn’t make you less. That matters.”

Therese stared down at the photo, the Peggy Carter that no one ever saw. That she wasn’t meant to see. “It would be easier if I’d never taken the damn picture.”

“Probably. But since when have you ever taken the easy route?”

“Sometimes I’d like to.”

They went quiet, the sounds of New York traffic drifting up from below. “You took it,” Carol said finally. “You can’t undo that. You can’t erase anyone’s scars, no matter how much you want to. They aren’t yours to carry.”

“What about shared wounds?” Therese asked.

“These aren’t shared, not with you. Not until they are.” Carol ran the tip of her thumbnail along the edge of the picture. “I couldn’t force that with Harge, and you can’t with them.”

“So where does that leave me?” Therese asked, gingerly grasping the other side of the photo, the one Carol wasn’t holding.

“You have to let it go, I think.”

“Do you?”

“It’s not yours to carry.”

Therese let out a breath. She tugged lightly on the picture and Carol released it. Standing, Therese went to the balcony railing. Atop the low wall the railing was attached to sat an ashtray, and a lighter someone had left out here, no telling if it was Therese, Carol, or Abby. Therese took the lighter, felt Carol’s presence behind her.

“Viking funeral?” Carol asked, placing warm hands on Therese’s shoulders. “A little dramatic?”

“It’s them. What counts as dramatic?”

“Fair point.”

Flicking open the lighter, Therese brought it to the bottom right corner of the photo, where Lizzie’s toy soldiers lay. The fire consumed them first, and Therese pushed down her desire to put out the flame, save the image. She placed the photo in the ashtray, watched it burn. Carol held on to her, her breath tickling Therese’s ear.

“Not mine, right?” Therese asked.

“No,” said Carol. “Peggy and Steve aren't like Harge, and Angie isn’t like me. It doesn’t have to be yours.”

With the small flame still going, Therese returned the lighter to where she found it, then turned in Carol’s arms. She kissed Carol until something loosened in her chest. When she pulled back, Therese used the fingers of both hands to part Carol’s hair, touch the scar she couldn’t see.

“That’s not yours either,” Carol said, without stopping her.

“Yes, it is,” Therese replied, holding Carol’s gaze. “This is mine because you are.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While things in this series are planned out to a certain extent, I'm always anxious to check out prompts, or just to hear from you guys. Hit me up on Tumblr if you're so inclined.
> 
> http://cblgblog.tumblr.com/

**Author's Note:**

> While things in this series are planned out to a certain extent, I'm always anxious to check out prompts, or just to hear from you guys. Hit me up on Tumblr if you're so inclined.
> 
> http://cblgblog.tumblr.com/


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